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presented by

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“Southwood”i Mussoorie U.

A LAND

By the same author

ARCHAEOLOGY OP JERSEY
PREHISTORIC BRITAIN
EARLY BRITAIN

SYMBOLS AND SPECULATIONS (Poetry)

Jacquetta Hawkes

A LAND

With Drawings
by HENRY MOORE

LONDON

THE CRESSET PRESS
MCMLI

In Memory of
W J TURNER

First published in 1951

by The Cresset Press Ltd., ii Fitzroy Square, London, W.i,
and printed in Great Britain by IVestern Printing Services, Ltd.,
Bristol

In this book I have used the findings of the two sciences of
geology and archaeology for purposes altogether unscientific. I
have tried to use them evocatively, and the image I have sought
to evoke is of an entity, the land of Britain, in which past and
present, nature, man and art appear all in one piece. I see
modern men enjoying a unity with trilobitcs of a nature more
deeply significant than anything at present understood in the
processes of biological evolution; I see a land as much affected
by the creations of its poets and painters as by changes of climate
and vegetation.

The nature of tliis unity cannot be stated, for it remains always
Just beyond the threshold of intellectual comprehension. It can
only be shown as a blurred reflection through hints coming from
many directions but always falling short of their objective.

If in A Land I have often recalled my own childhood, it has not
been so much from egotism as from a wish to steal that emotion
which uses our own early memories for a realization of the most
distant past. Certainly, for myself, in recalling the experiences
of tliat remotci, unknown child, I find I am being led back far
beyond the bounds of personality and of my own life.

Precision in scientific detail is not, perhaps, of great importance
for my purposes, but it has been my hope to avoid mistakes of
known fact. In this endeavour I have been sympathetically
supported by Dr. Kenneth Oakley who read my text at an early
stage and did all that could be done to save me from geological
error. I am also grateful to liim and to the British Museum of
Natural History for permission to use die chronological table
printed at the end of the volume. Again, it was Dr. Oakley who
advised Maurice Wilson on the content of the maps.

I have been exceptionally fortunate in assembling the pictures
which are an intimate part of tliis book. I was delighted when

A LAND

Henry Moore agreed to do the coloured drawings. Plate A may
be said to exemplify what I have written about his own work,
while Plate B is more closely allied witli the text. In writing the
passage about cfEgies lurking in the alabaster, I saw so clearly
how Henry Moore could render the image that when, afterwards,
he showed me his drawing I felt a most curious confusion
between my anticipation and his fulfilment of it. I am grateful
to Ben Nicholson for allowing me to use his Cornish landscape
drawing, never before reproduced. Walter Bird devoted extra-
ordinary enthusiasm as well as skill to his portrait studies of
fossils; no woman sitter can ever have been photographed with
more flattering admiration. He received every possible help
from the staffs of the Natural History and Geological Museums
at South Kensington.

For permission to use copyright material, I am indebted to:
Messrs. Faber and Faber, Ltd., for the extract from Norman
Nicholson’s ‘River Duddon* on page 66, and for the extract
from Robert Graves’s verses in The White Goddess on pages
162-3; to Mrs. Frieda Lawrence and Messrs. William Heine-
mann, Ltd., for the extract from D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Work’ on
page 167; to tlie Oxford University Press for the extract from
Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Pied Beauty’ on page 144; and to
Messrs. Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., for Sidney Keyes’s
poem ‘Wordswortli’ on page 238.

It now remains for me to thank my son Nicolas for the thought
and labour he put into die preparation of the Index.

Fitzroy Road,
London, N.W.i
December 1950

Jacquetta Hawkes

Contents

CHAPTER

PAGE

Two Themes

Creation

III

Recollection

An Aside on Consciousness

Creation of the Mountain Country

Creation of the Lowlands

VII

Digression on Rocks, Soils, and Men

100

VIII

Land and People

143

Land and Machines

199

Prospect of Britain

221

Appendix: Geological Time-Scale

240

Maps 1-4

following 240

Index

241

List of Plates

COLOUR PLATES
by Henry Moore

PLATE

A HIS LINES FOLLOW LIFE BACK INTO THE STONE

frontispiece

B KNIGHTS AND KIRTLED LADIES WAITING FOR

CREATION facing pa^e 120

MONOCHROME PLATES

M.ATB

LANDSCAPE IN SUTHERLAND

Gnarled rocks far more ancient than Life

facing page 48

TRILOBITE

Life assumed a firm outline

III

SEA-LILY OR CRINOID

They grew like flowers on the floor of coral
seas

FOLDED ROCKS NEAR OBAN

Upheavals in the Earth* s crust forced the
rock beds into pleats

ib)

PETRIFIED MUD-CRACKS

A mud surface crackled by the fierce sun of
Devonian times

FOSSIL nSH

EnameLscaled fish

{b)

FOSSIL HSH

‘ There must have been a horrible flapping
and floundering . .

LIST OF PLATES

*'^VI

SCALE TREE BARK

A handsome pattern from the Coal Forests

VII

AMMONITE MARBLE
‘ The ammonites now coiled and swam in
vast numbers*

♦

VIII

FOSSIL SHELLS

A cluster of bivalves once living in a warm,
shallow Jurassic sea

THE DINOSAUR Triccratops
‘ This was the day of reptile imperialism*

,112

AMMONITE

*Dy now the ammonites were assuming
bizarre and decadent forms*

113

FOSSIL HERRING

*The hair4ike bones of the Cretaceous
herring provoke aesthetic pleasure . . /

128

XII

(a) A LEAF IN STONE

Deciduous trees established the seasonal
rhythm

129

XII

{b) POT-HOLE FORMED BY A WATERFALL
* Henry Moore identifies women with
caverns, caverns with eye-sockets . . ,*

129

XIII

CORNWALL

An expression of Atlantic coast scenery by

Ben Nicholson

208

XIV

COBBLE AND BRICK BARN, NORFOLK
'Edmund and Rebecca had more love than
is usual?*

209

LANDSCAPE NEAR DEDHAM

An expression of the East Anglian country-
side by John Constable

224

XVI

Scotchman’s stone, greta bridge

Study of a Pennine river by John Sell

Cotman

225

List of Maps

Maps numbered i to 4 arc grouped together, immediately
^ following page 240

1 THE LOWER CARBONIFEROUS PERIOD

275-250 million years ago

2 THE JURASSIC PERIOD

1 70-140 million years ago

3 THE EOCENE PERIOD

75-45 million years ago

4 PLEISTOCENE PERIOD : THE ICE AGE

I million to 10 thousand years ago

These maps have been specially drawn by Maurice Wilson

CHAPTER I

Two Themes

W HEN I HAVE been working late on a sununer
night, I like to go out and lie on the patch
of grass in our back garden. This garden
is a square of about twenty feet, so that
to lie in it is like exposing oneself in an open box or
tray. Not far below the topsoil is the London Clay which,
as Primrose Hill, humps up conspicuously at the end of the
road. The hmnus, formed by die accumulations first of
forest and dien of meadow land, must once have been fertile
enough, but nearly a century in a back garden has exhausted
it. After their first season, plants flower no more, and are
hard put to it each year even to make a decent show of
leaves. The only exceptions are the lilies of the valley,
possessors of some virtue that enables diem to draw their
tremendous scent from the meanest sods. The sunless side
of the garden has been abandoned to them, and now even
in winter it is impossible to fork the earth dicre, so densely
is it matted with the roots and pale nodes from which their
flowers will rise.

Another result of the impoverishment of the soil is diat
the turf on which I lie is meagre and worn, quite without
buoyancy. I would not have it otherwise, for tliis hard
ground presses my flesh against my bones and makes me
agreeably conscious of my body. In bed I can sleep, here I
can rest awake. My eyes stray among the stars, or are netted
by the fine silhouettes of the leaves immediately overhead
and fi'om them passed on to the black lines of neighbouring

ALAND

chimney pots, misshapen and stoUd, yet always inexplicably
poignant. Cats rustle in the creeper on the end wall. Some-
times they jump down so softly that I do not hear them
ahght and yet am aware of their presence in the garden with
pie. Making their silken journeys through the dark, die
cats seem as untamed, as remote, as the creatures that
moved here before there were any houses in the Thames
valley.

By night I have something of the same feeling about cats
that I have always, and far more strongly, about birds:
that perfectly formed wliile men were still brutal, they now
represent the continued presence of the past. Once birds
sang and flirted among the leaves while men, more helpless
and less accomplished, skulked between the trunks below
them. Now they linger in the few trees that men have left
standing, or fit themselves into the chinks of the human
world, into its church towers, lamp-posts and gutters. It is
quite illogical that this emotion should be concentrated on
birds; insects, for example, look, and are, more ancient.
Perhaps it is evoked by the singing, wliistling and calUng
that fell into millions of ancestral ears and there left images
that we all inherit. The verses of medieval poets arc full of
birds as though in them these stored memories had risen
to the surface. Once in the spring I stood at the edge of
some Norfolk plougliland listening to the mating calls of
the plover that were tumbling ecstatically above the fields.
The delicious effusions of turtle doves bubbled from a
coppice at my back. It seemed to me that I had my ear to
a great spiral shell and that these sounds rose from it. The
shell was the vortex of time, and as the birds themselves
took shape, species after species, so their distinctive songs
were formed witliin tliem and had been spiralling up ever

TWO THEMES

since. Now, at the very lip of the shell, they reached my
present ear.

As I lie looking at the stars with that blend of wonder
and familiarity they alone can suggest, a barge turning the
bend in Regent’s Park Canal hoots, a soft wedge of sound
in the darkness that is cut across by the long rumble of a
train drawing out from Euston Station. Touched by these
sounds, like a snail I retract my thoughts from the stars and
banish the picture of the earth and myself hanging among
them. Instead I become conscious of the huge city spreading
for miles on all sides, of the imiunierable fellow creatures
stretched horizontally a few feet above the ground in their
upstairs bedrooms, and of the railways, roads and canals
r|^ed out towards all the extremities of Britain. The people
sitting in those lighted carriages, even the bargee leaning
sleepily on liis long tiller, are not individuals going to board
meetings in Manchester or bringing in coal for London
furnaces. For the instant they are figures moved about die
map by unknown forces, as helpless as the shapes of history
that can ht seen behind them, all irresistibly impelled to
the achievement of this moment.

The Thames flows widening towards the city it has
created; the coastline of Britain encloses me within a shape
as famihar as the constellations of the stars, and as con-
sciously felt as the enclosing walls of this garden. The coast
with its free, sweeping lines among die young formations
of the east and south, and its intricate, embattled line of
headland and bay among the ancient rocks of the west and
north. The shape seems constant in its familiarity yet in
fact is continuously changing. Even the stem white front
diat Albion turns to the Continent is withdrawing at the
rate of fifteen inches a year. I remember as a small child

A lAND

being terrified by a big fall of cliff at Hunstanton, and I am
certain diat my terror was not so much due to the thought
of being crushed — the fall had happened some days before,
as by some inkling of impermanence. It was the same know-
ledge, though in a sadder and less brutal form, that caxne
stealing in from the submerged forest, also to be seen at
Hunstanton, a dreary expanse of blackened tree stumps
exposed at low tide.

Always change, and yet at this moment, at every given
moment, the outline of Britain, hke all outlines, has reality
and significance. It is die endless problem of the philoso-
phers; either they give process, energy, its due and neglect
its formal limitations, or diey look only at forms and forget
the irresistible power of change. The answers to all the
great secrets are hidden somewhere in this thicket, those
of ethics and aesthetics as well as of metaphysics.

I know of no philosophy that can disprove that this land,
having achieved this moment, was not always bound to
achieve it, or that I, because I exist, was not always inevitably
coming into existence. It is therefore as an integral part of
the process that I claim to tell the story of the creation of
what is at present known as Britain, a land which has its own
unmistakable shape at this moment of time.

There are many ways in which diis story can be told, just
as a day in die hfe of this house behind me could be described
in terms of its intake of food and fuel, and its corresponding
output through drains, dustbins and chimneys, or in terms
of die movement in space and time of its occupants, or of
their emotional relationships. All these forms, even the
most material, would be in some sense creations of the
storyteller’s mind, and for this reason the counterpoint to
the theme of the creation of a land shall be the growth of

TWO THEMES

consciousness, its gradual concentration and intensification
within the human skull.

That consciousness has now reached a stage in its growth
at which it is impelled to turn back to recollect happenings
in its own past which it has, as it were, forgotten. In the
history of thought, this is tlie age of history. Some forms
of these lost memories lie in the imconscious strata of mind
itself, these dark, rarely disturbed layers that have accumu-
lated, as mould accumulates in a forest, through the shedding
of inntmierable lives since the beginning of life. In its search
for these forms consciousness is working, not always I
think very sensitively, through its psychologists. I am
certainly involved in their findings, but as narrator am not
concerned with them. Instead I am concerned with other
forms of memory, those recollections of the world and of
man that are pursued on behalf of consciousness by geologists
and archaeologists.

Unfortunately they have not yet gone far enough to
recall die formation of the planet Earth. In my own child-
hood I drew a crude picture m my mind of a fragment flying
off from the side of the sun, much as a piece of clay, carelessly
handled, flies from a pot revolving on the potter’s wheel.
Then diere were other, conflicting, pictures of the formation
of planets by awe-inspiring cosmic road accidents, immense
colhsions. It seems that both were fanciful. Yet as we have
not yet remembered what did happen, I must begin with
a white-hot young earth dropping into its place like a fly
into an imseen four-dimensional cobweb, caught up in a
dehcate tissue of forces where it assumed its own inevitable
place, following the only path, the only orbit that was open
to it.

At first the new planet was hot enough to shine -with its

A tANP

own light, but so small a particle, lacking the nuclear energy
that allows the sun to shine gloriously for billions of years
at the expense only of some slight change in girth, could
not keep its heat for very long. Its rays turned from white
to red, then faded till Earth was lit only from widiout,
from the sun round which it swung on an invisible thread.
From that time night and day were established, the shadow
of the Earth pointing into space like a huge black tent.

Writing in 1949 I say that night and day were established.
It is, I know, foolish to use these words for a time before
consciousness had grown in men and had formed the image
of night and day as the spinning globe sent them from
sunlight under the cone of shadow and out again at dawn.
I should wait to use tliese words until this procession of
light and darkness had formed one of die most deep-set
images in the mind of man. But the concept is now so
familiar that I cannot express myself otherwise.

I lie here and feel Eardi rustling through space, its rotun-
dity between me and the sun, the shadow above me acting
as a searchlight to reveal the stars whose light left them long
before there were eyes on this planet to receive it. Now the
two Httle globes of my eyes, unlit in the darkness, look up
at their shining globes, and who shall say that we do not
gaze at one another, affect one another?

The first pallor of the rising moon dimming the stars
over die chimneys reminds me of our modest satellite. I
have known her for so long that she is an accepted part of
the night, yet were I lying on Jupiter the sky would be
radiant with ten moons, while on Saturn die rings would
glisten day and night in a glorious bow. Now she has risen
into sight, our one familiar moon. A beautiful world to
our eyes, but cold and lifeless; without water or atmosphere

TWO THEMES

she is a presage of what Earth might become. I should like
to know whether in tliose icy rocks there are the fossils
of former hfe, organisms that had gone some way in the
process in which we are involved before they were cut
short by an eternal drought. Do they lie in the rocks beneath
the rays of a sun that once gave them life but now beats
meaninglessly on a frigid landscape?

I feel them at their employment, the sun, moon. Earth
and all the rest, even while more intimately I am aware of
Britain moving through the night which, like a candle
extinguisher, has put out her ordinary Hfe. But if, which
heaven forbid, I were at this moment to leap into a jet
aeroplane we could catch up with day in a few hours, or
could plunge into winter in a few days. It is difficult to
remember for how great a part of history these thoughts
and images would have appeared as the wildest delusions
of a madman. We felt more secure when we believed our-
selves to be standing on a plate imder the protective dome
of heaven with day and night given for work and sleep.
If we were less confident in Athens it was only by intuition
and native courage. Now knowledge of material facts
imposes humility upon us, willy niUy. Not that I would
allow myself to repent the divine curiosity that has led
to this knowledge. Like everyone else within the walls
of these islands I am a European, and as a European com-
mitted utterly to la volonte de la conscience et la volonti de la
dicouverte. To enjoy, to create (which is to love) and to try
to understand is all that at the moment I can see of duty.
As for apparent material facts, I hope that in time we shall
have come to know so many, and to have seen through so
many, that they will no longer appear as important as they
now do.

A LAND

At present, certainly, they are powerful; we have allowed
them to become our masters. Yet, strangely, as I lie here in
my ignorance under the stars, I am aware of awe but not
of terror, of humihty but not of insignificance.

Meanwhile the moon has drawn clear of the chimneys.
How ungrateful we have been to call her inconstant when
she is the only body in the heav^sns to have remained faithful
to us in spite of our intelligence, the only body that still
revolves about us. She is riding high and I must go to bed
before first the Isle of Thanet noses out, and then London
itself emerges on the other side of night.

CHAPTER II

Creation

^^LTHOUGH I WAS bom into a world which, at
/ ^ least in my part of it, had long made itself aware
/ % that it was not a plate but a sphere, and that it

-X wA-was the servant and not the master of the sun,
I was not bom too late to absorb some misconceptions
from my nurse. Indeed I kept an imquestioned belief in
one of these errors until only the other day, and I am there-
fore probably right to assume that many of my fellows
bcheve in it still. I grew up with the simple image of Earth
as a globe with an outer skin that was hard and cool but
which grew progressively hotter and more wholly molten
towards an unimaginably hot and molten centre. Tliis
picture, I now learn, is incorrect. Enormously the greater
part of the eardi’s sphere is very dense, perhaps an alloy
of iron and nickel. It is this metallic mass which draws the
compass needle so feithfuUy to the north and which made
the iron filings scattered by our physics mistress on a sheet
of foolscap dance so mysteriously and form radiate patterns
over the northern end of the magnet lying below the paper.
The core is enclosed in an outer layer about seven hundred
miles thick which may have risen to the surfece when the
earth was stiU fiery hot, as the dross rises when ores are
smelted, or as scum rises on boiling jam. The dross layer as it
formed further divided itself into two parts, a heavy lower
one of basalt and an upper one which on cooling crystallized
into granite. This granite froth formed the first land masses
of the world.

A tAND

In deep mines men work naked and stream with sweat
even when fer above snow is falling on their houses. A few
miles further down and the heat would become insupport-
able, deeper again and any shaft would begin to heave and
dose in, for it would have reached a depth at which the
rock substance was molten. Whatever the temperature at
the heart of the globe may be, radio-activity in the lower
parts of its outer layer produces heat that accumulates in
its deep imprisonment until it reaches such intensity that
the substance melts. Only a score of miles below the surface
on which we walk the crust is molten, though probably
held rigid by the pressure of the soUd rocks above. So the
picture I formed in the nursery is not fundamentally mis-
leading; we do in fact maintain our fragile Hves on a wafer
balanced between a heUish morass and unUmited space.
Even that wafer wears thin, a fact accounting for many
of the most stirring events in the history of the earth. In
spite of the claims of gravestone merchants, granite can be
gradually worn away by the combined and almost contin-
uous assault of sun and frost, wind and water, and Earth’s
skin of granite was so worn. But what is weathered away
is not lost, it must be redeposited elsewhere at a lower level,
often under water. It was in this way that granite became
the basic stuff of the sedimentary rocks that now form the
greater part of our landscape. Since hfe began it has, of
course, added immeasurably to these rocks, building up
vast thicknesses from shells, corals, the minute bodies of
foraminifera, chemical deposits provoked by algae, from the
accumulation of forests and peat bogs. But it began with
granite and the basalt that gouted up when the hard skin
cracked. It is curious to think that granite and basalt, with
litO, N,and COt, the water and early atmosphere of earth,

CREATION

have nude all the material paraphernalia with which man
now surrounds himself, the skyscraper, the wine-glass, the
vacuum cleaner, jewels, the mirror into which I look. And
the woman who looks? Where did it come from, this
being behind the eyes, this thing that asks? How has this
been gleaned from a landscape of harsh rockandemptyseas?

But to return to the wafer, and to the statement that it
wears thin. The irregularities of die earth’s surface at the
present time are shght enough — five miles up to the summit
of the highest mountains, six miles down to the deepest
sea-beds — ^less relatively than those of a smooth-skinned
orange. Yet even this slight irregularity is always under
attack by the powers already named, by sun and frost, -wind
and water, which erode the heights, transporting them grain
by grain and molecule by molecule to add them to the low
ground or to fill die hollows of the sea. Could this go on
long enough a dead level would result and we should all
perforce be plain-dwellers. There are many agencies
working towards the achievement of rest, of quiescence.
Gravity itself does much, through landslides, through
streams and torrents that tear and batter their beds and
carry doivn grits, pebbles, stones and boulders as their
waters rush back to sea level. Frost spHts, wind catches up
grits and uses them like sandpaper to smooth and wear
down exposed rock surfaces. The alternating heat and cold
of day and night causes rock to swell and to retract until,
weary of the process, its outer skin flakes off and is carried
away by wind or water. To this last form of levelling down
the geologists, who usually prefer such terms as isostatic
readjustment, have given the pleasing name of onion
weathering.

So, during a period of denudation, the levelling goes on.
B 17

A LAND

(Let it be remembered that the entire human episode has
coincided with a very short stretch of a single geological
period of denudation.) Everywhere the higher levels are
being attacked, and their substance, broken into pieces
ranging from dust grains to boulders, carried downwards.
Most of the carrying is done by rivers that either redeposit
the stuff along their lower reaches, fan it out in deltas, or
sweep it right out to sea. It is the finer particles that reach the
sea where they fall cloudily through the water and settle
on the bottom, layer after layer slowly Iiardening into new
rocks. New lands for old. There are two distinct kinds of
sedimentary rocks. The rivers do not only carry these
insoluble particles; some parts of the substance of the de-
nuded lands are soluble and these are brought down in
solution and then precipitated by chemical action. AU the
many varieties of sandstones and clays are formed by simple
deposition, the limestones and dolerites mainly by preci-
pitation. Chalk, once believed to have been built entirely
from the bodies of minute sea creatures, is now recognized
as a chemical precipitate, probably, however, created by
the action of living algae and certainly crowded with
the minute but elegant forms of the foraminifera. I like to
think of the seas where chalk was forming clouded with
white as though ffom a snow storm — a fall that lasted for
thirty million years and lay to a depth of a thousand feet.

The charaaer of new rocks acciunulating on the sea
bottom was naturally influenced by the character of the
denuded lands that were their parents. Much of the New
Red Sandstone still glowing warmly through Midland
rain was laid down in great lakes or land-locked seas that
covered central and northern England at a time when the
surrounding lands were sun-baked deserts. The soft, bluish

CREATION

clay known as the Lias was accumulating when slow riven
were meandering down from a country of lakes and forests
or swampy plains.

It is impossible to think of the blue Lias, of the mouldering
cliffs of it along the Dorset coast, witliout thinking also
of its fossils, of coiled ammonites, bullet-hke belemnites,
the huge skeletons of ichthyosaurs, and so also of fossils
in general. The young are now kinder than they were and
are more tender towards old age, more aware perhaps with
the growth of self-consciousness that it will come also to
them. But once old men were often called fossils, a most
misleading usage, for the chance that any of us, dying at
however advanced an age, having been given decent
burial, -will be fossiUzed is remote indeed. Sailors, perhaps,
have the strongest hope. The true fossil is a creature of the
sedimentary rocks, and the privilege of fossiUzation was
given erratically, incalculably. Sometimes whole popu-
lations of molluscs or corals would be fossihzed and their
bodies build up thick beds of rock; sometimes only one
in millions would gam this form of immortahty in death.

In the right conditions the dead body of any organism,
however ffail, even dchcate leaves, stems, fronds, might
sink down to the sea bottom, or be held in swamps or the
mud of rivers and there be petrified in the finest perfection
of detail. When we come upon them again it seems as though
time has revealed itself in a different dimension, as though
the particles that smothered and preserved them were not
grains of matter in space, but passing minutes; that these
are infinitesimal lives 'fiist fixed in time’.

So, layer upon layer, all the sedimentary rocks have been
laid down, sometimes attaining thousands of feet in thick-
ness — the limestones and sandstones, the chalk and clajrs

A LAND

die future of the earth’s surface, was the production of
minerals. Liquids and gases released by the heat escaped
into surrounding fissures to form alluring metallic veins.
The ancient furnace of the granite masses of Devon and
Cornwall poured out the tin ore which was to draw men
there, entice them to sink shafts and drive galleries until
at last the countryside was left derelict with the elusive
but powerful taint, the sense of degradation, that hangs
about it to-day. Sometimes, rarely, the fissures were filled
with gold.

The history of the earth’s crust, then, has a rhythm.
Denudation weakens it, the mountains arc rucked up and
the molten layer below forces itself towards the surface,
then the storm dies away and denudation begins again.
If the movement could be speeded up, as in a cinematograph,
we should see a rise and fall as though of breathing:

The bosom of the landscape lifts and falls
With its own leaden tide.

As will appear in greater detail in a later chapter, diere
have been three main periods of mountain-building since
Cambrian times; how many before can never be recalled.
About three hundred and fifty million years ago the
Caledonian uphcavel raised the austere and venerable high-
lands of Wales, the Lake District and Scotland — folds that
extended as far as Norwegian ranges which now have an
even more hoary look than our own. The highlands known
to men are no more than the worn stumps of mountains
once at least as high, angular and snow-covered as the Alps.
The building of mountains can been seen as a magnification
of what happens when a child digs a stout wooden spade into
hard sand. The spade sets up waves which break in a series

CREATION

of parallel ridges. It is easy to see how in the Caledonian
folding these ridges ran south-west to nordi-east, the line
being clearly set by the Great Glen. The Armorican folding
followed some hundred miUion years later; this time the
waves struck the resistant mass of the Caledonian moimtains
and although the main line of their ridges broke east and
west, forming the highlands of Devon and Cornwall, the
South Welsh mountains and the Mercian Heights, the
resistance they met caused the north-south folds marked
by the Pennines and the Malvern Hills.

The last of the three great mountain-building storms
was the Alpine that raised what is at present the greatest
upward irregularity on the surface of the planet. The back-
bone of the old world that runs from the Alps to the
Himalayas with its tremendous culmination in Everest,
is so lofty, so sharp, in its peaks only because it is young and
has not yet yielded to the forces that in time will wear it
down. Britain lay on the margin of the Alpine storm and
was stirred only by slight ripples that tipped up some chalk
in the south of England and, at their outmost limits, so
cracked the old rocks of the highlands diat molten magma
broke through in countless places, most freely in western
Scotland and Ulster.

Because they have no dangerous young moimtains,
Enghshmen migrate in numbers to the Alps. Those who
believe exclusively in the power of economic forces should
think how many things men will pursue in their lands
beside material products. They will move in their thousands
for the sake of wide views and sandy beaches, for singularity
and danger.

In the whole of Europe there remain only four active
volcanoes, Vesuvius, Etna, Mount Hekla and StrombolL

A LAND

Even theirs is the mild activity of late middle age: every few
yean a temporary increase in the steam that hangs over them,
a redder glow by night and some gouts of lava. These are
the last feeble throes of the Alpine convulsion. Persistent
hints of impermanence. We live in a world made seemingly
secure by the four walls of our houses, the artificiality
of our cities and by the four walls of habit. Volcanoes
speak of insecurity, of our participation in process. They are
openings not any longer into a properly appointed hell,
but into an equally alarming abysm of thought.

Although the Caledonian and Armorican foldings have
left us some wild country and tlic possibility of solitude,
Britain, without volcanoes or Alps or forests, is in general
a gentle and domesticated land that seems to be wholly
under our control. Yet it is not really controlled. Lie awake
at night even in our composed Britain and think how the
land about you is changing every hour, as surely as your
own body and as irresistibly. Here small avalanches arc
spilling down cliffs, there miniature land spits are drawing
clear of the sea, everywhere the hills are being attacked and
worn away. If ears were keen enough, we should be able
to hear the rustle of perpetual movement, a stirring of the
silence not much greater than that made by the petal of a
flower as it opens or closes.

‘We are fortunately living in one of the quiet periods
of the earth’s history ’ — z well known geographer begins
a chapter with a nonchalance that suggests that if St. Paul’s
were suddenly raised ten thousand feet into the air we could
all go tobogganing down the Strand. It is certainly true
that the present mild processes of change, the ceaseless
weathering, the occasional smothering of a Neapolitan
village, or the appearance of a new volcano in Mexico, is

CREATION

like a windless pond beside an Atlantic gale when compared
with the majestic cataclysms that have already happened
and are likely to happen again.

If man achieves the miracle of continuing his scientific
development and his existence until the end of this ‘quiet
period’ it is fascinating to imagine what Laputan devices
he will perfect to save his skin. I am going further still on
this excursion. Often when I lie in the garden at night I see
meteors slide across the sky, drawing their brief intensity
of silence behind them. In their silence and sudden extinction
they recall fireflies in a Mediterranean evening; but while
the movement of die insects appears to be controlled and
deliberate, die shooting stars are plainly caught up in an
irresistible velocity that is the cause ahke of their brilliance
and its extinction.

Seeing them I think of a case in the Geological Museum
at South Kensington. It contains many jagged lumps of
matter, the exceptional, the fortunate fragments of shooting
stars which have survived their journey and the friction of
our atmosphere and have succeeded in embedding them-
selves in this planet. Some of the lumps have been cut and
polished to show their structure — crystalline or otherwise.
The labels in the case explain that there are three kinds of
meteorite, those composed of almost pure iron, those that
are of iron and stone mixed, and a group formed of almost
pure stone. These three substances correspond to the central
core and the inner and outer crusts of our own earth. This
correspondence is not surprising for the universe is sub-
stantially homogeneous, and shooting stars are chips from
globes very much like our own. They arc, as the label in
the Science Museum soberly states, ‘fragments of former
worlds’.

CHAPTER in

Recollection

G eologists and archaeologists, those in-
struments of consciousness who are engaged
in reawakening the memory of the world,
have one guiding principle for dieir work. It
is called the Law of Stratification, but it is as simple as
falling downstairs — and, indeed, resembles it in that both
are inevitable results of the working of gravity.

If instead of one apple falling on the head of Sir Isaac
Newton a heavenly orchard had let tumble a rain of fruit,
one of the greatest of men would have been overwhelmed
and then buried. Anyone examining the situation after-
wards in a properly scientific spirit, clearing the apples
layer by layer, would be able to deduce certain facts. He
would be able to prove that the man was there before the
apples. Furthermore, that the blushing Beauty of Bath
found immediately over and round Sir Isaac fell longer ago
than the small swarthy russets that lay above them. If, on
top of all this, snow had fallen, then the observer, even if he
came from Mars where they are not famiUar with these
things, would know that apple time came before snow time.
Relative ages are not enough, the observer would want
an absolute date, and that is where Sir Isaac comes in again.
An examination of his clothes, the long-skirted coat, the
loose breeches and the neghgoit cut of his linen, the long,
square-toed shoes pointing so forlornly up to the sky, would
date the mail to the seventeenth century. Here would be a
clue to the age of the apples and snow.

RBCOUECTION

The apples and snowflakes of this whimsical analogy are
the equivalent of the falling grains that compose sedimentary
rocks, and the whole of the great Law of Soratification
means no more than this — that the Beauty of Bath must be
older than the russets lying above them. Nor is Sir Isaac
Newton a mere red herring, although he may be said to
represent a preserved marine creature of some kind. He
represents a fossil, and fossils are necessary to the study of
stratification as we realized only a little more than a century
ago. The realization was due to William Smith, the ‘Father
of Stratigraphy’, who, as a civil engineer, engaged chiefly
in canal construction, had rare opportunities for observing
the relation between the strata through which these new
cuttings were driven. Even before Smith’s day, John Strange
had been impressed by the persistence of the oyster-like
shell, Gryphaea, in the blue clay occuring at the foot of the
Cotswolds and known as the Lias. But it was William
Smidi who first enunciated the principle so important to
stratigraphy that the strata may he identified by the fossils they
contain. Could any principle be more monumentally simple?
The deposition of the Beauty of Bath may be dated by
Sir Isaac Newton’s clothes, the Lias by the cut of the shell
worn by the mollusc Gryphaea, the successive horizons of
the whole Jurassic system by the changing fashions prevalent
among the ammonites.

This use of our greatest physicist is not merely whim-
sical or fantastic. For one thing he was related to Gryphaea:
they shared common ancestors. Those first pricks of con-
sdouness of organisms too amorphous to survive in the
memory of the rocks, spongy masses of life, were ancestral
to the mind of the great genius. They were the sources of
his being as surely as was the gilled brat that had grown

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in his mother’s womb before he was ejected into the world
a howling, matter-of-fact baby with gills lost and genius
not yet formed.

A second legitimate comparison which can be drawn
between Sir Isaac Newton and a fossil is provided by his
clothes. Anyone who has heard of a geologist is likely also
to have heard of an ammonite, and most people are acquain-
ted with their decorative spiral shapes. They may have seen
huge ones ranged along tlie top of a wall: they may as
small children have fingered cut and polished specimens in
use as paper-weights on their grandfather’s desk, or have
peeped at the very smallest varieties lying on cotton-wool
in a curio drawer. Ammonites, a temporarily successful
form of life that swarmed in die Jurassic and Cretaceous
seas, are now extinct. Their nearest surviving relative is
die nautilus that still sails through the waters of die Pacific :

Learn of the Little Nautilus to sail.

Spread the thin oar and catch the driving gale.

These creatures always occupy the last and largest compart-
ment of their shells, all other divisions of the spirals being
earlier living-rooms outgrown and sealed off by the late
occupant behind a thin, nacreous partition. Thus the nautilus
and the ammonites live with the whole course of their
physical existence coiled behind them and when they die
leave these spiral monuments to brief and obscure lives.

During the period when they were the most successful
of die smaller sea creatures, many species of ammonite,
each with a differendy designed shell, rose to pre-eminence
and disappeared. Some began to protect their shells with
bosses and spines, perhaps to make themselves unpalatable
to the vast reptiles and sharks that grazed among them on

RECOLLECTION

the sea bottom. But with certain species this process of
evolution ran amok, the protective devices became so
elaborate, so cumbrous, that the tender inhabitants of diesc
fortresses could no longer support the burden and were
overwhelmed by other and more adaptable rivals. There
is some merciless force in evolution that may cause trends,
once they have begun, to become excessive and at last
pathological, the unfortunate species concerned being
utterly helpless and unable to check their racial suicide.
There was for example Synthetoceras, an early species of
deer which, in addition to a pair of normally placed antlers,
developed an immense forked horn growing vertically
from its delicate nose. The creature must have looked more
ridiculous than Munchausen’s stag with a cherry tree
sprouting from its forehead; it is not surprising that it
found life intolerable and rapidly became extinct.

The analogy with human fashion is a reasonable one.
While it is strongest for the fifteenth-century knights
whose plate armour would certainly have led to their rapid
extinction had they not lived in the aquarium of the feudal
system, the history of the ammonites can be compared
with that of any fashion — those inexplicable trends that
culminate in some cuWc-sac of fantasy and must be sup-
planted by a fresh ideal.

The fact really contributing to die theoretical argument
is that just as the costume expert could tell instantly in which
decade the figure (who happened to be Sir Isaac Newton)
had been entombed in apples, so the geologist could recog-
nize each species of ammonite preserved in the Lias and
date it within some five million years.

Each alike illustrates the uniqueness of every moment,
life’s continuous burning of boats. Every layer of the sedi-

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mentary rocks that has formed since life began, each layer
of rubbish accumulated since man became an artificer, can
be distinguished through this extraordinary fact — that
existence is never for two moments the same. The land on
which we live, the seas by which we are surrounded, are
never still; the forms of insects, fish, reptiles, birds and
animals arein constant just as individual fife is inconstant.
Every Uving creature among us has taken an irrevocable
step between the beginning of this sentence and its end.
The way in which men make buttons, build houses, paint
pictures or judge of virtue is never the same between John
and Johnson.

So by diversity and process the geologist and archaeo-
logist are enabled to do their work, to distinguish each
pecuUar instant of time. Certainly, since die days of John
Strange and William Smith an astonisliing amount of this
work of recollection has been achieved. The layers of rock
that have formed, grain by grain, since Cambrian times have
been shown to reach a total thickness of four hundred
thousand feet, and although this vast accumulation is never
found all together in one place the fossil labels allow every
layer to be recognized wherever it may occur. As most
rocks are formed on lake or sea floors or by imusual wind
conditions, it is obvious that while one layer is being laid
down another is being denuded, while a third may remain
unchanged. This differential formation is one of the causes
that make it hard to arrange the strata ncady hke the num-
bered pages of a book. Anodicr is the disturbance caused
by mountain building when huge slabs of earlier rocks may
be raised and thrown down again on top of their true
successors. Again, extreme denudation may be confusing.
An ignorant man walking in the Sussex Weald and looking

BECOlLBCnON

at the chalk downs might be expected to think they were
more ancient than the sands below his feet, yet in feet the
chalk of the North and South Downs would once have met
over his head in a lofty dome that has been washed away
to expose its base of sands and clays. Finally, pressure may
cause faulting, that is to say a vertical or nearly vertical
split through many layers of rock wliich allows the two sides
to slip differentially. The whole prosperous Lowlands of
Scotland are no more than a block which has shppcd down
between two gigantic faults, one along the southern edge
of the Highlands, the other along the northern edge of
the Cheviots.

After differential formation, overlaying, denudation and
faulting, it is not easy to place the strata in sequence, to be
certain that a deposit in Dorset is of the same age as another
in Yorkshire. Geologists must match fossils as carefully
and laboriously as a dressmaker matches stuffs.

Nevertheless the rapidly mounting self-consciousness
of the world, by taking possession of ardent young men and
by keeping them possessed until they die elderly and revered
F.R.S.S, F.S.A.s, and F.G.S.S, has already, as I have shown,
recovered a great deal from its long period of unconscious-
ness. These possessed individuals with their hammers and
spades and their curiosity have recalled the history that is
summarized in the table at the end of this book. I have
included this table chiefly in order to save a more arduous
explanation in the text, but also further to obscure the
question as to whether this is, or is not, a work of science.

One striking feature of the table is the number of names
of English or Welsh origin that appears in it. Because
during the nineteenth century that small part of the earth’s
crust known to us as the British Isles supported an unpre-

A LAND

cedented ferment of thought and activity, it won many
distinctions which to the children of future generations
may well seem strange.

It fell to the Victorians to survey the welter of time and
space and to decide to discipline it, to give it outlines and
pin down the resulting shapes Avith labels bearing names
and numbers. Through dieir force and conviction, their
abihty to create ideal forms in the flux of process, vast
fragments of ‘time’ arc, for as long as Western civihzation
endures, known to die rest of mankind by names formed
by our tongues for our land.

There are pre-Cambrian and Cambrian, labels for those
inconceivably remote ages when life was organizing itself
from its first vague essays into the already shapely and
dehcate creatures that swarmed in the silence of Cambrian
seas. The name derives from Cambria, the word used by
our seventeenth-century antiquaries as a romantic tide for
Wales. The Silures and Ordovices were the Celtic tribes
dominant in Wales at die end of the Iron Age who died
in diousands among the mountains they strove to defend
against the Roman armies. Their hands and feet must have
been familiar with the detail of the rocks over which they
fought, and it is suitable that their names should have passed
into those of the periods when the rocks were formed —
the Ordovician and Silurian. As it happened, the first of
these names was not estabhshed without a struggle. Those
gready possessed men, the geologists Henry Sedgewick
and Roderick Murchison, fought until death over the
labelling of certain Welsh rocks which one wished to call
Upper Cambrian and the odier Lower Silurian. It was only
after the bodies of both these men, abandoned by con-
sciousness, were simple chemistry once more, that it was

MCOLLBCnON

agreed by tlieir successsors to recognize the disputed rocks
as a new division, and to give it a name, the Ordovician,
which, as one of them said, commemorated the ‘last and
most valiant of the old Cambrian tribes’.

The following age has the name of a most English county.
Devon is now always to be linked with die formations in
which the first vertebrate fishes appear, those slender
beginnings of our own manly spines. The Permian cele-
brates discoveries made by Murchison, even though he made
them outside his own country, while Carboniferous and
Cretaceous refer to English coal and Enghsh chalk. Even
for the Tertiary era when the character of the geological
names changes sharply, the Victorians are still in command.
Eocene, Oligocene and the rest were names devised by
Charles Lyell in whose mind diey took shape as a result of
the classical education given him by Victorian England.
So a soimd, ‘eos’, uttered by Greeks at the sight of Medi-
terranean dawns, was carried in memory to be appUed to
some English clays and sands and die age which they
represent — the early morning of the mammals.

A chapter on method has ended as a narrative, for the
subject of study and the study have shown themselves to
be one.

CHAPTER IV

An Aside on Consciousness

P ROUST HOLDS HIMSELF like a naked nerve at
the centre of a trembling web of remembered
consciousness. No sound or smell or physical de-
tail of his surroundings escapes him; his awareness
of the complexity of emotion, thought and association in
himself and in others is almost too sensitive to be endured.

Newton and Einstein drive their minds into regions un-
touched by experience; Mozart appears as a man bom
without some obstruction that prevents ordinary people
from communicating witli a stupendous world of under-
standing, All of them represent the furthest achievements of
an evolutionary process which relates them to the chemical
constituents of the planet.

It has been thought that solar radiation acting upon sea
water first enabled matter to reproduce itself and hfe thus
to begin. Now it seems that drying mud is a more likely
cradle. I had always imagined that the earliest essays in life
would be microscopically small, but, on the contrary, it
was probably in quite large masses of matter that repro-
duction began. Whatever the size of these first pieces of
life, whether they preferred sea water or mud, nothing but
some fifteen hundred million years separate them from
their outcome in Proust. They have grown also into butter-
flies, into the elaborate lobster and the simple worm. But
the dominant, the significant process in those millions of
years has been the heightening of consciousness. It remains
the only visible opening for significant development in

AN ASIDE ON CONSaOUSNESS

the future. Among the earliest creatures known from die
Cambrian rocks are the trilobites, a large family of primitive
crustaceans, which for an immense span of time were the
aristocrats of hfe. To-day the lobster is a very fine fellow
whether he promenades the sea-floor in flashing blue or lies
pink and opulent in an entree dish; whether he eats men
under water or is eaten by them in their world of air. But
he has gone too far. Imprisoned in his splendid, his fantastic
external skeleton he has no expanding future. If man leaves
die feast he will not rise from the dish to make himself
master of some new region of hfe. It is no better with the
birds. Though in their isolation the wrens of St. Edlda may
have grown longer tails than the wrens of the mainland,
they cannot achieve anything much more significant. The
birds burnt all their boats when they left the ground; so it
has been with all our fellow creatures — they have committed
themselves too far. The gazelle is given over to fleetness,
die rhinoceros to strength, the giraffe, diough he can reach
the topmost leaves, already looks impossible.

It seems, although certainly it is only we in our ignorance
who say so, that our minds alone arc free to go forward
to something significandy new. There may be a time when
all school teachers can expect to have sitting before diem
children of the capacities of Newton and Einstein, Mozart
and Proust, while the men of genius move in a country
far beyond our present guessing. There may be, or it may
prove that brain development must be likened to that of
the horn of Synthetoceras.

It has been a divenc yet constant process, this heightening
of consciousness. I shall not attempt to interpret the exper-
iences of the first cells when they suficred fission, but will
begin with the trilobites that represented the most complex

A LAND

and shapely form life had achieved by the end of Cambrian
times. To secure food was the first duty of consciousness,
and the trilobitcs, some of which had as many as three eyes
of a rough and ready sort, were sufficiently aware of matter
looming towards them through the water to move in pursuit.
For the first time an image, however blurred, was being
received by a hving organism.

This most vital faculty was advanced by the fishes who
must have seen a dim, flat world but one that contained
distinct shapes, and shapes that were related to one another.
When the reptiles left the water hfc in the air was a tremen-
dous stimulus towards the refinement of the senses. Diplo-
docus was ninety feet long and had a brain the size of a small
kitten’s; nevertheless the brain was there in the heavy skull
and, helped out by a smaller nerve centre above the hips,
controlled the vast, straggling nervous system. The toed
feet could feel the ground, be aware of the different texture
of sand, wet stone or slime as they waded into die water. The
hdless eyes as they swung at the end of a neck as long as a
crane recorded bright, meaningless pictures of lagoons and
fern trees. The nose, too, was sensitive, and made its own
arrangement of tlic smells coming from mud, from crushed
vegetation and from animals dead and living.

It was among the early reptiles that consciousness gained a
new incentive and a tremendous new agency for its own per-
fection. For the first time the male had to seek and take the
female. Perhaps it is too gross, too crude a piece of sensation-
alism, to claim for those reptilian couplings, all slime or scale,
some part in the creation of Heloise and Abelard, yet it is
the truth. There is something more here than sexual selection,
immensely powerful as tliat has been in the evolution of
life. The forces of attraction and repulsion, of mutuality,

AN ASIDE ON CONSaoUSNESS

in all their forms, have acted like some universal, instinctive
artistic genius, creating all that is most highly formed, most
brilliantly coloured in the world : all that is furthest from
the drab equality of chaos. Insects have intensified the colours
of flowers, fighting has set delicate antlers on the stag, court-
ship has given birds dicir brightest plumage. Love refines
and sharpens human personality and provokes poetry
and music.

Before the great reptiles had disappeared, the mammals
were there widi dicir keener senses and their far more com-
plex brains. They experienced fear and anger, and, beyond
reptilian sex, they knew family life. Even die nest of a
tree shrew can do much to incubate consciousness. Before
long the small tarsier appeared widi his forward-looking
eyes — eyes so disproportionately large that he seems still
startled by the stereoscopic vision that made the seen world
one and gave it a third dimension. The nut was seen to be
plump, the receding glade asked to be explored.

And so to apes and men. A long-drawn efibrt to correlate
hand and eye and brain in non-instinctive movement; a
complication of emotion tending towards refinements of
love and liate; a widening separation of the self from its
surroundings. Then, suddenly, tlie bison painted on the
cave wall. What has happened since then but fifty thousand
years of the accumulation of experience and an erratic but
pitiless sharpening of thought and feeling?

This gadiering up of consciousness during time can be
followed also through space. It stretches up through time
from the placid mass of cells on the drying mud, through
reptiles browsing on the branches of trees and the little
mammals peeping on them through the leaves, up to Proust
in his exquisite, agonizing web. So, too, at this one moment

A LAND

of time I can feel consciousness stretching from the crystal-
line virus that blights tomato plants, through fish, reptiles
and mammals to the minds of men. Indeed, it is obviously
only an expedient convention to stop with the forms of
life that are earliest in time, or the simplest in space. Con-
sciousness must surely be traced back to the rocks — the
rocks which have been here since life began and so make
a meeting place for the roots of life in time and space, the
earliest and the simplest. Why, indeed, stop with this planet?
Even if nothing like the human psyche and intellect have
developed elsewhere, it is necessary in an indivisible uni-
verse to believe that the principle of consciousness must
extend everywhere. Even now I imagine that I can* feel all
the particles of the universe nourishing my consciousness
just as my consciousness informs all the particles of the
universe.

At this my own flesh should be clamouring. Why go
so far afield when here in the ball of your thumb, in the
muscle of your thigh, is unconscious life. Every cell that
makes tliis ‘me’ has its individual life, and if skilfully trans-
planted to another medium can grow and multiply — ^might
even be made to outlive ‘me’. Similarly I have rehearsed
tlic story in time. Starting from a single cell, I passed one
period of my Ufe with gill slits inherited from my fishy
ancestry, then for a few weeks sported a tail and was hard
to distinguish from an unborn tree shrew. The protest of
the flesh is reasonable. Why think of viruses or pre-Cambrian
organisms when inside this deUcate membrane of my skin,
this outhne of an individual, I carry the whole history of
hfe. I am a community of countless units, from cells to
complex organs, living unconscious lives, yet supporting as
their king the invisible power that is enthroned in the brain.

AN ASI0B ON CONSCIOUSNESS

As in the physical being the foetus recapitulates episodes
in the history of Ufe, so each individual consciousness, that
most fleeting manifestation, carries beneath it, far out of
reach of normal memory, episodes in the history of con-
sciousness back to its remotest origins.

Because mind, like the matter in which it is immanent,
seeks to continue itself, it suffers the strange pangs of love,
love which can serve its end in two ways. Eidier it leads
mind to strive for union with another and so to continue its
existence in a new creature, or excites it to creative activity
of all kinds, and above all to project itself through the arts.
Whereas the new physical creamre represents die pro-
longation of consciousness in die stream of time, these
projections — pictures, poems, symphonies — arc the per-
petuation of a phase of consciousness motionless within the
stream. Fossils of the psyche. So might a dinosaur either lay
its leathery eggs and so secure posterity, or allow its own
dying body to roll down to the sea bed to be preserved
through all time.

We have become very conscious of the individual being,
apparently neady enclosed by its covering of skin, recog-
nizable as ‘me’, a being to be disliked or desired but certainly
a distinct and particular entity. It is the natural tendency
of our mode of perception. Even a fire we contrive to see
as a separate thing radicr diaii as a chemical process affecting
a wide area round the visible flames and smoke. A human
being is hardly more cut off from its surroundings than is
a naked fire. It is continuously exuding gas and moisture
and consuming other gas; a variety of waves can pass
through a wall, through air and through a human body
almost without interruption. It seems that the mind itself
can issue waves, or something akin to them, that can pene-

A LAND

tratc and be received by other minds. Every being is united
both inwardly and outwardly with the beginning of life
in time and with the simplest forms of contemporary Hfe.
‘Me’ is a fiction, though a convenient fiction and one of
significance to the consciousness of which I am the tem-
porary home.

I think that we arc returning to an awareness of our unity
with our surroundings, but an awareness of a much more
exalted kind tlian anything that has existed before. The
primitive tribesman, to go no further back than the early
days of our own species, was still so deeply sunk in nature
that he hardly distinguished himself from his environment
or from his fellows. This sense of oneness shows itself in
totemism and in many forms of magic. In the identification
of the name or image with the living person ; in summoning
rain by spitting water, or in the behef that a man by leaping
into the air can make the coni grow tall. In this, just as in
the foetal gills, the child repeats the development of the
species, he does not distinguish — ‘Tis the eye of childhood
that fears a painted devil’.

It is in this natural unity that the savage may truly be
said to be happy. Certainly civilization must always destroy
it. In urban, literate surroundings self-consciousness becomes
a sharp knife cutting man away from his matrix. It was
early sharpened among the Greeks, but the collapse of the
classical world before Christianity and tribal barbarism
brought a respite. For another thousand years the mind of
an agricultural society was rocked by the comfttrting
seasonal rhythm.

If the East threw the knife away, the West retrieved it.
After die Renaissance its possession became the mark of
Western civilization — la volonti de conscience et la volonte de

AN ASroE ON CONSCIOUSNESS

J^couverte. It was not hard to bear, indeed it could be exhil-
arating, for man to feel isolated if he also felt important
in his isolation. But, needlessly perhaps, man allowed himself
to be dwarfed by his own discoveries, by his recollection
of evolutionary processes and of the humble place of the
earth in the material universe. He was left not merely
naked and lonely, but apparently insignificant. Perhaps
this condition reached its most terrible pitch of sensitivity
in the present century with those who, like Proust, accepted
it. and those who, like D. H. Lawrence, tried to retreat.
Even for the mass of the people for whom the knife was not
so finely sharpened, the god who died and was resurrected
in the spring had deserted them.

Yet I believe that those who have had the courage to
suffer la volonte k conscience et la volonte kiecomrte are now
already half assuaged. Mind, which at first denied men their
instinctive sense of wholeness, is at last returning such a
sense, but on its own mental level. Consciousness is melting
us all down together again—earth, air, fire and water,
past and future, lobsters, butterflies, meteors, and men.
As for me, what other force has driven me to attempt this
book?

CHAPTER V

Creation of the Mountain Country

T here are nature films that show the opening
of a flower, an iris perhaps, in as short a time as
it takes a woman to get out of bed. I remember,
too, seeing a French film in which the time was
so much hastened that the evening hour passed in a minute
and darkness fell visibly. What the camera can be made to
do so smoothly and with so little effort, I in this chapter
must attempt, clumsily, widi words; I must try to niake a
few thousand of them show the fluctuations in die earth’s
crust, the coming and going of the species that have had
their day of world domination.

I have already suggested that the processes of mountain
building and denudation were like breathing, a regular
rise and fall. This rhythm exists, and is significant, but
with it go the smaller and erratic movements of die crust
and the resulting interplay of land and sea. Running
through the whole composition, acutely sensitive to all
its fluctuations, life is like a tunc that grows louder and
louder.

If it proves to be possible, this history should be described
in such a way that it can be seen as one continuous move-
ment and not as a series of stills such as are shown in geo-
logical text-books.

If only some powerful cin^-caniera could long ago have
been set up on the moon: by running through its record
at tremendous speed it would be possible to apprehend the
movements of land and sea and the evolution of life as

CREATION OF THE MOUNTAIN COTOTRY

the continuous processes which in fact they arc. Towards
the end of the last available reel the jaws of Scotland, the
snouted face of Wales, the elegant Cornish toe, stumpy
Kent and the bald head of Norfolk would be seen taking
shape among the waves. Then, as the last few feet ran out
with cities spreading, roads and railways stretching a net
over this transient fragment of land, and millions of tiny
figures flowing like the corpuscles of a blood stream, we
should be left in eager anxiety as to what was to happen
next in this flux of events. That is how our world should
appear. It is only the pathetic shortness of human life diat
gives each individual a sense of the permanence of his back-
ground. The land we all walk upon has been under the sea
many times, and it will be submerged again.

There has been no recording camera, and the liistory has
to be told in words that rely on rocks, fossils, relics and the
heroic but puny efforts of a few men. It must not limit
itself to events alone; the senses must be fed — for surely
Berkeley will not stir if we recall the blueness of gentians,
the redness of deserts, the shadows of reptiles among cycad
trees that had passed before our senses were there to exper-
ience them? Perhaps it is impossible for it to be success-
ful. It will demand a continual whipping of the vitality
to keep the words as true expressions of consciousness, to
prevent them from turning into some dead march of the
intellect.

In the heart of the hunting shires, at Chamwood Forest
in Leicestershire, cutting through the sandstones and marls
of Triassic times, the remains of pre-Cambrian rocks rise
in shattered ridges. They are hard, many of them with the
intense hardness of quartzite, and without memory of life.
These most ancient rocks arc exposed again, and more

A LAND

boldly, ill the Highlands, along the western fringes of
Scotland and in the Western Isles. Among the oldest of all
are the gneisses of the Outer Hebrides, rocks whose immense
experience of the world has made them hard, but exqui-
sitely fine-grained. It is quite useless to try to reconstruct
the map of pre-Cambrian times, to attempt to interpret
rocks that have suffered crushing, bending, breaking and
violent heat; have had molten granite thrust against them
from below and thousands of feet of deposit laid on them
from above. There are signs of periods of mountain building
and of remote Ice Ages, but they are dim and worn by the
passage of time, and many text-books, with proper cautious-
ness, begin witli the Cambrian Age. Before following their
example, I want to capture something of the nature of that
young world.

The young world must have had a most ancient aspect.
In our old one, so rich with experience, what could be more
youthful than England in April? It has taken three thousand
milhon years to create that youthfuhiess, those fierce young
buds and frail eggs, greenness that seems to cry aloud, diose
songs in the throats of birds and hope in the heart of man.
The resurrection of the spring god. The young world was
without spring; it knew nothing beyond rock and water.
There was the colour of open skies and of sunrise and sunset,
but when the sky was overcast the landscape was sombre
beyond our present comprehension. Colour had not as yet
been concentrated in leaves, petals, feathers, shells. The
only sounds came from the movement of water, whether
of rain or streams or waves, from thunder, and from wind
sweeping across rocL At long intervals this passivity was
convulsed by erupting volcanoes and by the rending and
falling of vast masses of rock, but silence and stillness pre-

CRBATION OF THB MOUNTAIN COUNTRY

vailed. No one inured to the din created by our species can
conceive the silence of a calm day on pre-Cambrian earth.
I cannot use the word hush which perhaps best conveys
the sense of a closed-in silence for it also implies a world of
life that has fallen silent. This was a negative and utter
quiet. For us, in addition to our own noise — die racket
of cities that must in fact penetrate the surrounding coimtry
— and that of animals, birds and insects, there is a fine tissue
of imperceptible sounds; vegetation growing, leaves and
flowers moving, all the stirrings of growth and decay. Then
there was nothing. Perhaps in die heart of deserts that
ancient stillness may persist, yet we cannot experience it,
for wherever we go we take a humming community of
life with us— ourselves.

The Cambrian Age, widi which orthodox geology begins,
was one of those periods (if it is permissible to use diat
modest word for sudi an immodest stretch of time) when
the sea was dominant over the land. The whole area of
Britain lay below the water towards the end of an ocean
trough whose northern shore followed roughly the present
Adantic coast of North America, although hnked with the
Pacific across Central America and Panama. Sloping gently
nordi-eastwards, this shore passed not far to the north of
Scodand, the trough being partially closed at its north-east
end by a land mass covering much of what is now eastern
Europe. The whole southern coast of tliis proto-Adantic
Ocean (which has been given the name of Poseidon) was
formed by a vast continent that for the next four hundred
miUion years was to unite South America, Africa, Arabia,
southern India and Australia in one continuous land mass.
This continent the geologists, with their surprisingly wanton
fancy, have named Gondwanaland, so giving us the verbal

A LAND

landscape of Poseidon lapping upon Gondwanaland — the
name of an Indian valley elevated to meet the god of all
the oceans.

As for that patch of sea floor that corresponded to the
future British Isles, sediments from the northern continent,
and more remotely from Gondwanaland, were forming
the substance of future rocks. Those that arc now exposed
are in North Wales and round Skiddaw, in the Isle of Man
and along a narrow belt in north-west Scotland from Loch
Carran to Durness where Cambrian rocks fringe the inland
edge of the still more ancient formations of the coast.
Anotlier outcrop of this age is in Shropshire, where
again it lies against pre-Cambrian survivals in the strange
countryside of the Longmynd. Far out of sight and
out of mind beneath our feet, a massive Cambrian
ridge supports southern England, deeply buried by later
deposits.

The oldest Cambrian rocks arc quartzites, sandstones and
limestones, but by tlic middle of the period when the sea
floor had sunk to its lowest, fine-grained black mud filtered
slowly down to form beds of shale. Before the end of
Cambrian times the land was rising again and in shallower
seas were formed the slates of North Wales, which after
much pressing, folding, faulting arc now tlic finest roofing
material in the world. So all those particles that drifted
through the waters of Poseidon and sank as soft, rich mud
on its floor have been raised up again to bum and glisten
on countless houses, looking sometimes from far off like
small, angular mountain ranges.

In North Wales the Cambrian strata if piled upon one
another would have a thickness of eighteen thousand feet.
Wc have all, I hope, some experience of the depth of mud

CMATION OP THB MOUNTAIN COUNTRY

that can form at the bottom of a duck-pond in half a life-
time, but here we are dealing with an area that was at a
distance from the nearest mud-producing lands. The
accumulation to this depth of grains that had drifted far
through the sea before coming to rest on its floor, gives
some impression, like the rustling ticks in a clockmaker’s
shop, of the passage of time, the expending of a hundred
million years.

Geological text-books open with the Cambrian Age
because it saw the shaping of life into forms assertive enough
to endure. In yet earlier ages diere must have been many
living forms that lie beyond die reach of memory, because
they were too dim, too soft-bodied and faintly outlined
to leave even ghosdy traces. Almost all we have are a few
impressions of jelly-fish and worms, and deposits of graphite
and carbonate of hme that may have been created by algae
and bacteria or other elementary aquatic organisms. The
existence of earlier forms is proved only by the variety that
life had achieved when in Cambrian times many species
developed the habit of secreting limy external skeletons
that drew a firm line round diese tentative essays in living.
Whether they did so for protection, or willy nilly as a
result of an irresistible chemical pressure for the secretion
of excess calcium carbonate, may now never be recalled.
What is certain is that this early imposition of form
upon matter made the creatures themselves far more
prone to fossilization, and so has preserved for us some
memories of species ancestral to ourselves and all other
animal life.

The land remained utterly barren, but in the sea the
invertebrates were evolving so fest that by the end of the
era all the main divisions were established — ^though in

A LAND

primitive forms. By that curious mechanism which some-
times allows the evolution of a whole species through
millions of years to be rehearsed in the flash of an individual
life, some modem shellfish reproduce in their embryonic
state the ancient forms which once fed in Cambrian seas.

Many soft-bodied creatures swam or floated in the surface
waters or buried themselves in the sand; in Britain we have
no memory of them, but in British Columbia there are
remains of stagnant swamps or sea-beds where dehcate
organisms were held tenderly in the mud and preserved
with the utmost perfection down to the details of minute
digestive systems, of hair-fine antennae. In the shallow water
over northern Britain worms tunnelling in the mud have
left not dieir bodies, but marks of their passage — the burrows
and tracks conspicuous in the pipe-rock of north-western
Scotland.

The masters of these seas were the trilobites, primitive
crustaceans looking not unlike woodlice, and sharing
(a few of them) the art of curling into a ball. Some of these
creatures were of pinhead size, but most were an inch long
and a few species were monsters of eighteen inches, the
largest, most highly organized forms that hfe had attained.
Among the trilobites were varieties that were blind scaven-
gers of the mud, but others had two, or even three, eyes
in which, as I have said, some faint perception of the
natural world for the first time took shape.

In their way, the brachiopods, or lamp shells, were as
successful as the trilobites. Round the fringes of the ocean,
enclosed between homy or limy shells, these animals
swayed with the movements of the tides, floating bamacle-
like on fleshy stems that anchored them to the sea-floor.

Then there were the graptolites, colonies of tiny organisms

Gnarled rocks tar more ancient than life

CTEATION OP THE MOUNTAIN COUNTRY

living together in homy sheaths, cities that were built on
various plans. The Cambrian forms were reticulated and
tliese delicate nets with their microscopic inhabitants
floated on the surface of the water and were often blown
or carried by tides and currents far out to sea. When a
colony perished their city sank to the bottom and might
be fossilized in deep-sea muds beyond the range of the
trilobites and other creatures of the shallow margins. This
habit of long sea voyages distributed the graptolites widely
about the world, and, as difierent species succeeded one
another quite rapidly in time, they arc invaluable to
geologists. Perhaps no other group except the ammonites
is a better guide for the correlation of strata in regions far
removed from one another. William Smith woirld have
foimd them creatures after his own heart.

The coralline sponges, other builders of great communal
tenements, were lovers of warm water. The fact diat the
limestones and reefs formed from them are found among
Cambrian rocks as far apart as Greenland, Morocco and the
Antarctic suggests that the earth at this time ofiered an
equable climate for the further incubation of her new life.
Text-books suggest that the land was probably desert — ^but
is it possible to have desert when there was no Hfe on land
to desert them? Alternatively is it possible to have anything
else?

The rise in the land level that had brought the shores of
Poseidon closer to Britain during the late Cambrian Age
was reversed in the succeeding Ordovician when the sea
again covered land which had for a time been exposed. It
is possible, however, that for at least a part of the seventy
million years of the Ordovician age southern and south-
east England emerged above the sea. Certainly it was a

p 49

A LAND

time when the Poseidon trough was buckling a litde,
puckering into ridges running from south-west to north-
east — forerunners of the vast Caledonian folds of the next
phase.

In the main the building of the British Isles went on with
the accumulation of muds in deep water and shelly sand
in shallow — the stuff of future shales, slates and sandstones.
These are represented now by some of the Skiddaw slates
and by tlie Ordovician parts of the famous rock scam
running through Shropshire from Longmynd to the Wrekin,
a seam recalling a span of time from the pre-Cambrian to the
Silurian period. The Ordovician seas seem to have been
shallow in Wales, where the shelly sands are commonest,
and to have deepened towards Scotland where odier rocks
formed at diis time now run from the Rhinns of Galloway
to the Pendand HiUs. Anodier covmtryside that was largely
made at dais time was of course south-west Wales, the home
of the Ordovicians and the scene of the great Sedgewick-
Murchison controversy. The mild, imdulating plains of
Pembrokeshire were laid down layer on layer below Ordo-
vician seas, although later eruptions of igneous rock have
made the curious outcrops, like African kopjes, against
which farmsteads and cottages crouch for shelter. These
outcrops and the buildings that are part of the same rock
look like islands of activity among the quiescent plains.
The headlands, too, that fang the sea between Fishguard
and St. David’s are of volcanic rock that resists while
the intervening, softer, Ordovician sediments are worn
away.

By far the most dramatic of these eruptions of the molten
substratum took place in the adjacent part of the sea-bed
that was to become North Wales. Ffere the cracking of

CmnON OP THE MOUNTAIN COUNTRY

the Cambrian and pre-Cambrian crust allowed die eager
magma to gout up in masses that now form the mountains
of Snowdon and Cader Idris. There is something eloquent
in this conflict between the old elements of fire and water
as volcanoes belched on the ocean bottom. There must
have been savage turmoils in the sea when the great plutonic
masses humped themselves up and Uquid lava flowed about
the sea-bed, sometimes pushing between the layers of sedi-
ment, sometimes spreading out on the floor where it was
i.aoulded by die pressure and movement of the water into
soft pillowy forms strangely luisuited to its own brittle
substance. But the conflict became really magnificent,
the three eyes of trilobites perhaps dazzled by flames and
flashes while the floating colonies of graptolites were flung
into the air, when volcanic energy was enough to break
through the water and make a true eruption in mid-ocean.
The clouds of dust and ash thrown up by these submarine
explosions rained back on to the sea and formed volcanic
beds among the siltings of mud and sand. Often huge
numbers of dead trilobites, brachiopods, and graptolites
must have sunk to the bottom, candidates for fossiUzation,
as these cataclysms tore the waters that were their breed-
ing grounds.

The seas became more than ever full of creatures, for
these disturbances seem to have provided a cliaUengc that
stimulated the evolution of life, encouraging bold experi-
ments among old groups, and establisliing new ones.
Geology oflEers many facts in support of tliose who see
conflict and war as necessary to creation. The developments
were not so conspicuous as they were to be after the titanic
Caledonian upheaval, but many new invertebrates appeared
while old fiaims were evolving. The graptolites increased

A LAND

fast and developed little floats to support them tlirough
the waves; brachiopods strengthened and beautified their
shells widi the elegant ribbed fan that the scallops have
introduced to our dinner tables. The trilobites, on the
other hand, were showing signs of decline, and at least one
of them, die genus Ampyx that grew long curved spines,
may already be recognized as a decadent.

New types of coral decorated clear and shallow waters
which swarmed with minute bryozoa; there were sea
snails, and ancestors of die cuttle-fish and octopus. These
hved in conical shells, some curved, some straight, some
partially curved. As though it had found some weak place
in the carefully balanced forces of life, one of the cepha-
lopods shot (during tens of millions of years) to a length of
fifteen feet — a fitting horn for some primeval triton.

The cchinoderms, sea animals diat include the starfish
and the beautiful plant-like crinoids or sea-lihes, had put
fordi an entirely new branch in die sea-urchins. These arc
still, surely, among the greatest delights of all the delicious
bric-a-brac of the seashore, whether they are bristling wida
the hedgehog spines diat give diem their popular name,
or whether their spines have been shed and diey lie in bare
perfection, hke little round boxes of silver filigree. Midway
in time between these contemporaries of our own and their
earliest Ordovician ancestors, sea-urchins were abundant
in the Cretaceous period and left the Chalk full of dieir
neat fossil cones widi fine inscribed lines radiating from
the apex. Because their shape and these rays made diem
natural sim symbols, the Bronze Age peoples of Britain
had magical uses for them, sometimes burying them with
the dead. On Dunstable Down in a grave cut into the
Chalk itself, a Bronze Age man was buried lying crouched

CRJEATION OP THE MOUNTAIN COUNTRV

witliin a ring of scores of fossil sea-urchins; for those who
left him there, he lay underground warmed by as many suns.

That Sedgcwick and Murchison were able to maintain
so long a dispute over the Ordovician deposits of Wales
is enough in itself to show that no sharp break divides
this horizon from that of die succeeding Silurian Age. One
passes gradually into the next. Even volcanic activity was
for the time reduced although there were some minor
eruptions which contributed to tlie present contour of
ihe Mendip Hills. The slow buckling of the Poseidon
basin continued, and so too did the silting up of the troughs
that it formed. Occasionally and in places the seas were
clear, shallow and warm enough to allow the formation
of organic limestones, including the famous Wenlock
Limestone, in places richer in fossils than any other sedi-
ment in Britain.

The limestones forming Wenlock Edge, had Housman
known it, preserve for us an idyllically peaceful moment,
die brittle elegance of Hfe round coral reefs in shallow,
sun-irradiated seas. The corals and sea-lilies have been held
there just as diey grew, but with limestone instead of warm
sea water standing between dieir branches and in their
fragile cups. With them are the trilobitcs and other small
creatures which swam among them or scuttled in the crannies
of the reefs. So common and so conspicuous arc die fossil
trilobites in some parts of die Wenlock limestone diat they
have won the local name of Dudley locusts. There is, I
think, something pleasing in this vision of the sober English
countryside, and the woods on Wenlock Edge stirring
painfully deep in the poet's mind, while below the surface
of the land and of time this tropical world was standing
motionless. Now Wenlock Edge, the name slowly shaped

A UND

by the tongues of the Shropshire people who passed their
lives beside it, has become a rich image standing for all
these things — as indeed it was probably the words more
than die geographical reahty that worked in Housman’s
consciousness.

One of the greatest expanses of Silurian rocks is in
Central Wales, where, without the help of volcanic out-
crops, it has made a relatively tame landscape; another in
die Southern Uplands of Scodand runs as a broad belt
along the southern edge of die Ordovician rocks from
Wigtown to the Lammermuirs.

The latest of the Silurian deposits, those of the Ludlow
shales, were accumulating during die final phase of the
filling up of the basin that had covered much of Britain
since early Cambrian times. So great was this silting that
the graptohtes with their seafaring habits began to dechne,
and by the end of Devonian times diis once prosperous
family had almost died out. It is suitable that they were
given their original name of graptohtes because their
fossils, showing as faint black hnes on the shale, were
thought to resemble writing. In fact no other creatures
have done more to write history with their own physical
remains.

But apart from such local or special difficulties there was
nothing to deflect life from the course on which it was now
so strongly set — that of growing more and more complex
and highly organized and of thrusting in new directions
wherever an opening was found. It was now (though we
have no evidence for it in Britain) that plant fife began to
adapt itself to the land; organic existence, although in its
most passive forms, was dragging itself out of the water.
Now, too, the backbone, that cord which runs from our

CMATION OF THE MOUNTAIN COUNTRY

own back down to these remote beginnings, was develop-
ing in primitive vertebrates. The remains of a torpedo-
like creature closely akin to the surviving lancclet has been
found in shales laid down in a Silurian estuary in die region
of Lanarkshire.

The last silting of Poseidon with ten thousand feet of
I flags, grits and mudstones, to say nodiing of the coastal

I lining of coral reefs, marks the end of an era. The Calc-

i donian mountain building that brought the Silurian period

I tO a violent close and continued during the Devonian

I caused a radical change in the earth’s surface. It altered the

I relation of land and sea and piled up huge mountain chains

I which, however much diey have since been broken and

I eroded, did begin to give our region of the world some of

I the features it still possesses.

I The line of the Caledonian folding is clearly marked by
I the Great Glen and all those roughly parallel south-west
I by north-east valleys corrugating the Scottish Highlands.

I It not only folded die Higliland ridges and valleys but in
■5 at least one place in the extreme north-west (round the
Cromalt Hills) tore up a platform of hundreds of square
' miles of pre-Cambrian rocks and pushed it sideways over
younger formations. In the soudi the Ordovician and
Silurian shales were crushed into small pleats to form the
Southern Uplands.

vJ Cumberland, Westmorland and North Wales were
affected by the tremendous pressure, but the masses of
V igneous rocks that had broken through the crust in Ordo-
vician times were tough enough to offer some resistance
!< and to save the sedimentary beds from the shattering dicy
suflfered in the Southern Uplands.

'% Looked at as a whole, the Caledonian folding left five

A LAND

great mountain masses roughly following the south-west
to north-east axis. First in the south was the so-called St.
George’s Land nmning from North Wales right across
the present Irish Sea to the south-eastern angle of Ireland.
Next to the north was the shorter ridge extending from
the Lake District as far as the Isle of Man, then that of the
Southern Uplands reaching from south-west Scotland
down to Ulster. The Grampians formed another massive
ridge, but between them and the Southern Uplands the
Scottish Lowlands subsided as a single block dropping
between die mountain masses. As for the Great Glen itself,
where now the Caledonian Canal links a chain of ravishingly
lovely lakes, it was tom by a sideways slip, the whole bulk
of the north-west Highlands slipping against that of the
Grampians. Finally, a long fold with a scarp along the
south-east face formed along the western Highlands through
Donegal and on to Connemara.

Meanwhile, in a much wider field, the pattern of land
and sea had changed. Both Gondwanaland and the northern
continent, which can conveniently be called Adantis, had
so far advanced their coastlines that ancient Poseidon had
been reduced to a narrow sea running from the neigh-
bourhood of Montreal almost due east to Scandinavia.
This oceanic ditch, which we have come to know as Tethys,
in spite of many fluctuations was to maintain a recognizable
existence for at least a hundred million years. Britain was
now, as it were, heavily camouflaged. The scarp of the
west Highlands fold was a part of the northern shore of
Tethys so that the extremities of Scotland and Ireland with
the Hebrides were all merged in Adantis. From a point
just off the southern tip of Norway, however, this shore
swung back in a long peninsula which ended in prongs

CRBATION OF THE MOUNTAIN COUNTRY

formed by die new mountain ridges of Britain. Thus one
long arm of the sea ran across central Scotland, while a
smaller inlet covered the Lowlands. South of the St. Georges
Land promontory the whole of South Wales and south-
west and southern England were under die open Devonian
ocean that stretched over all Western Europe.

It is a difficult feat for us, so secure within the familiar
shape of our island, to picture it divided between a northern
continent and a greater Scandinavian peninsula. At least,
however, our land was no longer altogether submarine,
and it has never again been totally submerged. Through all
the see-sawing that was to follow, some part of Britain
would always know the sun.

No sooner were the Caledonian mountains piled up than,
inevitably, denudation began to wear them down. The
folding had left innumerable weak places where the usual
agencies of denudation, water, wind, frost and sun, could
work quickly. The land had a raw, unstable look. Where
now our mountains are plainly almost at rest, modest in
height and rounded or with low angles — bare, worn bones
with no flesh clinging to them — the new ranges were at
first as lofty as the Alps and Himalayas, with the same
provocative peaks and precipices which for a while would
defy gravity and its ceaseless effort to drag them down.
We can try to recall how magnificent peaks stood against
heavy blue skies, their rocks heated by a fierce sim and their
lower slopes red, dusty deserts bright with mirage. Every
year violent rains set in and streams and rivers choked with
sediment bowled larger stones with the force of spate. At
these times avalanches fell and whole hillsides slipped
downwards, while the rivers shed their burden in lake-beds,
valleys and huge deltaic fans. Every year this seasonal

A LAND

attack was launched, every year for seventy-five million
years, and by the end of it the mountains had been cowed,
brought down almost to their present level. In many places
it was only the granite mass that had risen to fill the base of
the range which endured, the heavy skin of sedimentary rocks
having been entirely wx)ni away. As for tlic vast mass of
material carried down from the Caledonian mountains,
much of it forms the famous Old Red Sandstone filling so
many Scottish valleys, including Glen Mor itself, and pro-
viding die good agricultural soil of the Lowlands and the
western English Midlands. Wherever it is found at its
most characteristic, in Herefordshire, for example, it still
glows with the remembered warmth of Devonian deserts.
In north Devon and Cornwall dark muds laid down instead
of the sandstone have provided the Cornish slates, quarried
in die glistening, harsh and rather sinister quarries found at
such centres as Delabole.

It was in the Old Red Sandstone that Hugh Miller, the
devout Scottish quarrynian for whom geology was near
to poetrv% first knew the excitement of exposing die bodies
of creatures that were certainly fish, but fish quite unlike
any then known to man.

Hugh Alillcr’s books include Footprints of the Creator^
while his presidential address to the Royal Physical Society
was entitled Geological Evidences in Favour of Revealed
Religion. So far from being troubled in his faith by the new
geological discoveries, he believed that each great geological
age with its distinctive species was a separate creation by
the Almighty and therefore a further proof of his power
and (I think one must add) ingenuity. Hugh Miller was an
instance of that phenomenon so much more exciting than
an evolutionary mutation, of a boy bom to unknown work-

CREATION OF THE MOUNTAIN COUNTRY

ing-class parents with an innate and irrepressible capacity
for romance, wonder and knowledge. He disciplined him-
self to remain for long an ordinary working quarryman,
but his fire could not fail to be seen and in the end he had
academic recognition, if not fame. It was a fire that enabled
him to write one of the few classics in English geology.
To my mind he and Mary Aiming of Lyme arc by far the
most remarkable, because the most spontaneous, of all the
manifestations of consciousness roused in quest of its
origins. Certainly the imprint of tlieir minds and fives will
remain in the history of geology with all tlie sharpness of
their own finest fossil specimens.

In his account of liis first discovery of Devonian fishes
in the Old Red Sandstone, Hugh Miller describes how he
split open a calcareous nodule and found inside ‘finely
enamelled’ fish scales. ‘I wrought on with the eagerness
of a discoverer entering for the first time a terra incognita
of wonders. Almost every firagment of clay, every splinter
of sandstone, every limestone nodule contained its organism
— scales, spines, plates, bones, entire fish ... I wrought on
until die advancing tide came splasliing over the nodules,
and a powerful August sun had risen towards die middle
of the sky; and were I to sum up all my happier hours, the
hour would not be forgotten in which I sat down on a
rounded boulder of granite by the edge of the sea and
spread out on the beach before me the spoils of the morning.’
This August day was in 1830. The young man’s hammer
had discovered the remains of the earliest fishes, the Ostra-
coderms whose leathery skins w^ere armoured with plates
and spines, and who, lacking a jaw, fed through a slit set
below the pointed snout. The Devonian seas were full of
these creatures.

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Occasionally, when an island sea dried up, there must have
been a horrible flapping and floundering, a dull rattling
of homy armour before they suffocated and the bodies of
untellable shoals were buried, later to form a dense mass of
fossihzed remains.

Such happenings, however, were no more than local
catastrophes, for elsewhere these vertebrates and tlieir suc-
cessors, so crucial in the evolution of species, throve and
multiplied to such an extent that the Devonian is sometimes
called die Age of Fishes. By die middle of the period as well
as die Ostrocoderms (many would wish to withhold die name
of fish from an animal that could not open its mouth) there
were more developed fishes of many kinds, some of them
already wearing scales. A few species such as Dinichthys grew
to as much as twenty feet and had heavily armoured jaws as
ruthless as a mechanical excavator. It is true that before
them die eighteen-inch trilobites, the six-foot arachnids,
had their relative power to tyrannize, but it seems that
these great predatory vertebrates must have brought die
first keen fear into die sea. Something akin to human
emotion ran along diose newly evolved spines when
Dinichthys hurled himself among the helpless shoals.

Among the scaled fish one Devonian group seems to
have held the secret of the future. These were the varieties
that had paired fins and lungs enabling them, if stranded
by seasonal drying, to shuffle back to the water. From
them, so far as we know, is descended the whole train of
the land vertebrates.

Already before the close of the Devonian Age, the land
had taken the place of the seas as the stage on which the
great scenes of evolution were to be played. Algae and
seaweed had already breathed out the free oxygen that

CREATION OP THE MOUNTAIN COUNTRY

made life on land possible. With this invisible atmospheric
envelope of the earth ready to conceive it, life came up
from the sea. The lunged fish had given rise to true amphi-
bians; all manner of insects, not yet able to fly, had crawled
on to the land, and there were millipedes, mites and spiders.
The land that had always been silent and undisturbed began
not only to be minutely stirred by small burrowings and
by the growth of plants, but was marked by the impress
of feet, even though between the footsteps went die groove
of a scaly tail.

The country which the eyes of these amphibians saw
sharply if vacuously was already green. With a virgin
environment to exploit, die new land plants flourished amaz-
ingly. They were of those smooth, spiny and militant kinds
we have come to associate with tropical conservatories, but
already diey had much in common with modem plants; sap
flowed in them and they breathed through open pores.
Indeed, by the end of the age the vegetation had developed
far towards the luxuriance of the Carboniferous forests.
There were die foiuitain-like tree fern, and seed ferns carry-
ing little nuts below their fronds; the big horsetails had a tree
growth and there were even forerunners of true conifers.
All these forms arc extinct, yet they were so near to what
has become famihar that I doubt whether the ordinary,
unobservant passer-by would notice them if they could
spring up again in hedgerow or wood.

In no geological scheme is the Devonian accepted as a
major turning-point; it docs not mark either the beginning
or the end of one of the great eras. To me, in this effort of
recollection, it appears to be one. However broken up and
unrecognizable, some of die land that was to be Britain
was clear of the sea and green with vegetation. The main

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masses of our mountains had been formed, and the Old
Red Sandstone was ready to support heavy cornfields and
cider orchards. To watch the close of a Devonian day would
not have been the unimaginable experience of a few hun-
dred million years earlier. As the shadows of the trees
lengtliened there would have been a clapping and harsh
rustling of the big leaves on the river bank as clumsy
animals pushed among them; if there was no birdsong or
even die humming of insects at least there was that most
characteristic evening sound, the occasional splash of fish
in quiet water.

Perhaps more than any other, the age that followed was to
reach through time and eficct the face and fortune of the
British Isles. This it was to do by creating a substance — coal
— ^which at a certain moment in their historical evolution men
sought as eagerly as food, so eagerly that they were ready to
leave their habitat and become pale-skinned burrowing
creatures, coming to the surface only at night. To move
away from die pleasanter places and huddle their dwellings
round the grimy entrance to dieir tunnels.

At first, with some spread of warm and shallow seas,
limestone formed, the Carboniferous or Mountain Lime-
stone that was to be built into some of the most solid
and respectable piles in England, buttresses of its pride and
self-confidence. The work of silting up these Carboniferous
seas was completed by deposits brought from die northern
continent of Atlantis, then hot, mountainous and swept by
monsoons. A large river with tributaries drawn from terri-
tories stretching from the north of Scotland to Norway
poured out its coarse sediments across north-eastern England.
So were Norwegian pebbles brought to Yorkshire and held
in the Millstone Grits that were laid down as the deltas of this

CREATION OF THE MOUNTAIN COUNTRY

northern river. Silting, combined with the elevation of
expanses of low-lying land and the influence of the warm
rains of the southern monsoons, led to the formation of
marsh and brackish swamps where the Coal Measure forest
grew in sombre luxuriance.

It is sombre in these swamps, for the fohage is dark green
and there arc nowhere any flowers. Yet tlierc is scent in the
air. Here already is tlic rich aromatic breath of resins, a
presage of the smell of pinewoods on summer days when
pine cones crack in the sun. In many places the trees grow
straight from the tepid water that carries a dull film where
clouds of pollen have blown across it. Ferns feather die mud-
banks and there are thickets of horsetails with the radiate
whorls and neatly socketed stems of their diminished and
weedy descendants. When, as a very small child, I was play-
ing widi a horsetail that had been growing as a weed in one
of our flower-beds, dismantling it section by section like a
constructional toy, I remember how my father told me it
was one of the oldest plants on earth, and I experienced a
curious confusion of time. I was holding the oldest plant in
my hand, and so I, too, was old. Now huge horsetails arc
growing in the Carboniferous swamp wliile above them the
fern trees with their sprouting leaves cut off most of such sun-
hght as has succeeded in straying through the still loftier
canopy of the scale trees — the lycopods whose slender trunks
are chequered like snake skin. Across the hundred-foot ver-
ticals of the growing scale trees are the diagonals of many
that have fallen and lodged against their fellows, while others
lie horizontal, already half-digested by the swamp. Here
decay is active among growth, trees and ferns thrusting
towards the summit of their life while others are slowly
reverting to inorganic forms.

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Among these imperceptible rhythms of growth and decay
arc the quicker movements of the swamp creatures. There
are shoals of fish in the pools and slow streams of the forest;
vast beds of molluscs line the edges of the lagoon. Dragging
their wide belUes across the mudbanks, sagging heavily back
into the water go amphibious monsters like grosser croco-
diles. Over the streams and pools, through the oppressive
greenish light, with a clittering of glassy wings, twist
gigantic dragonflies, the largest insects the earth will ever
know.

There is still no spring in diese forests, for all the fohage is
evergreen, no seasonal rise and fall but only, continuously,
Ufe going on beside decay. The toll of decay mounts with
the centuries, the swamp hves above a tremendous accumu-
lation of its own past, tree-trunks, leaves, and fronds, and
scattered among them the broken bodies of die animal
population — ^boncs, enjpty shells, the wings of dragon-
flies.

The swamp itself mounts slowly, but meanwliile the
whole platform of land is sinking until somewhere far away
the sea breaks in, sea water invades this stagnant world, fishes
choke, the amphibians, if they can, move away and die
insects go — ^as insects do. For a time forlorn, ragged trunks
of dead scale trees stick through the water. But they sink, the
whole scene sinks and the particles of sediment begin to fall
again burying all the dead stuff of the swamps and forests in
layers of forgetfulness. It is a drowsy scene to contemplate,
and sleep muffles me. I see Loxomma, the amphibian, his flesh
fallen away to reveal the long column of his spine and the
litde bones of his hands and feet. The spine is lengthening,
vertebra after vertebra, without end, and running through
the vista of their bony arches there is a mounting current, a

PLATE 1V(./) lOl.PED HOCKS NEAR OHAN

Upheavals in the Earth’s crust forced the rock beds into pleats (see p. ss)

PI ATF IV(/)) PPTRirir.I) MUD-CRACKS

A mud surface crackled by the fierce sun of Devonian times (see p. S7)

CREATION OF THE MOUNTAIN COUNTRY

sense of the passage of some energy and power. The vista of
arches — I sec now that it is a tunnel and that there are living
creatures crawling along it, each with a single eye shining in
Its head. I am stupid, they are only lamps, and the roaring in
my cars is nothing but a drill, one of those confounded
drills. ‘Christ, look at the old blighter,’ someone says,
and I notice that Loxomma is there again (perhaps he had
never gone) and they have excavated him with their drill.
‘Makes your spine creep a bit, don’t it.^ Christ, look at that
hand . . .’

Towards the end of the formation of the Coal Measures
and in the age that followed there w'as a bout of earth
movement, another crumpling of the beds of sedimentary
rocks widi the usual accompaniment of volcanic eruption.
Tethys had by now sliifted further south, and Britain was
embedded in the eastern end of the continent of Atlantis, but
an inlet from a northern arm of Tethys covered northern
England while another basin extended across the south-
western peninsula. This Armorican folding was to build die
main architectural features of the Midlands, as the Caledon-
ian had shaped the Highlands. It tipped up the Carboniferous
Limestone and Millstone Grit into the Pennines, and, at
right angles to them, raised the Malverns and south Welsh
mountains. Near to the centre of disturbance, Cornwall and
Devon were sharply folded up against the resistant Welsh
massif — as can be seen in die dramatic zig-zags of the pleated
rocks at Bude. Here in die soudi-west it is once more the
core of magma thrust into the base of the folds that has
survived later denudation and now forms the masses of
Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor and the lesser granite outcrops
of the peninsula. Its heat was great enough to meta-
morphose the surrounding rocks and cause the deposition of
E 65

A LAND

veins of tin and other ores that were to draw men
there and so to cast over much of Cornwall that faint but
pervasive sense of degradation which everywhere follows
rural niining.

In many ways this Permian Age was a repetition of the
Devonian. It, too, was an arid period, when newly built
mountains were being denuded in desert conditions. The
New Red Sandstone and the red marls have die same linger-
ing glow of desert suns that bums in the Old Red. It seems
ironical that Permian deserts shoiJd have created the
scenery in East Devon which is like some self-conscious
primitive painting with its red fields and green grass, and
trim, toyhke atmosphere. Their influence shows, too, in the
red cliffs of Cumberland round St. Bee’s Head.

Where through the rocks the waters ooze
Red as the sap in the trees
And becks swill seaward, rich as wine
The haemorrhage of the split mine.

Much of Norman Nicholson’s poetry, springing so directly
from this countryside, shows the same red stain.

Again in Permian times evaporating seas became so over-
laden with salts that slowly the hfc in them was bhghted.
In successive layers in the narrow belt of Magnesian
Limestone east of the Pennines it is possible to see how the
brachiopods grew stunted and misshapen as molluscs do
to-day when they struggle with the same conditions in the
Red Sea.

I have come to the end of the span of three hundred
miUion years which the geologists have marked out in the
stream of time and given the name Palaeozoic. It is a break
with little real significance for the purpose of these memoirs,
but, Uke so many scientific devices, it has a rough and ready

CREATION OP THE MOUNTAIN COUNTRY

usefulness. Many of the creatures, such as trilobites and grap-
tolites, which had been dominant in earlier seas, had died out.
On the other hand, while there had been a few reptiles in the
Carboniferous, they were only now to seize the oppor-
tunity for their fantastic proliferation, the indulgence of
tlieir megalomania. Mammals and birds, not yet ready to
make their appearance, were beginning to show faintly, like
the ghost shots of the cinema, in the bodies of their rep-
tilian ancestors.

In the history of the creation of Britain, too, the break has
its convenience. There was to be much retoucliing, but the
whole highland part of the islands had now been roughly
shaped. The lovely ancient country of Cornwall, the Devon
and Somerset moorlands, Wales and die Pennines with the
stuff of the Yorksliire dales and the whole of Scotland was
essentially there. It had a hot and sometimes desert climate
in place of the present soft climate of Atlantic rains; it was
trodden by amphibians and reptiles instead of deer ; its rivers
were full not of svelte trout and sahnon but of barbaric
grotesques with homy armour and spines ; its more fortunate
valleys grew scale trees rather than silver birch; the croaking
of amphibians was its best substitute for bird song. Perhaps,
indeed, a few conifers and some dragonflies were the closest
living link between then and now. But the stracture was
there. It was already certain that this would never be a land
of mild fertility from which all wildness could be driven by
cultivation. The moimtains would endure to feed those roots
of human nature which are starved in cities and even among
cornfields. It was a himger that began to be felt in the
eighteenth century when Englishmen had won their battle
against too much darkness and began to be conscious of too
much light. By the end of the Palaeozoic era the possibility

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of Wordsworth was assured. When the time came for his
birdi the way would be open for his poetry as immediately
a way was open for die extraordinary new shapes of the
reptiles.

CHAPTER VI

Creation of the Lowlands

D uring the opening phases of the Mesozoic
era land remained dominant over sea and Britain
lay embedded in the continent of Atlantis.
Tethys, still a narrow trough, separated Atlantis
from Gondwanaland. Arid conditions remained and in many
regions of the planet there were wide deserts with expanses
of brackish water. Here and there in Britain crackled mud
surfaces have been uncovered which once formed die mar-
gins of such lakes and pools. Sometimes they bear imprints
left by passing reptiles, and sometimes the marks of heavy
raindrops — ^memories of the storms that seasonally broke in
upon the torrid heat. Looking at these footmarks with the
dents and stars of the raindrops on the parched surface, the
reality of a harsh, shimmering red and intemperate world
returns for a moment.

At first two salt lakes or inlets covered south-western
England and much of the Midlands and the north, but late in
Triassic times they merged into one and the greater part of
England was under a single shallow lake. From this lake the
Cumberland and Westmorland mountains, the Pennines,
and at times lower outcrops such as Chamwood Forest and
the Wrekin, rose as rocky islands. With its water exposed to
fierce sun, evaporation was great enough to allow the
deposition of the salt beds of Cheshire and Durham, the
thick crystalline veins which now men quarry and refine,
box, and label witli neat, invented names. It is one more
example of the perpetual effort of human consciousness to

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impose itself on the undifferentiated mass, to shape ideas and
ideals — packet of Cerebos. At the same time, too, we are
witnessing, as a simple physical fact, men turning to these
deposits to replenish the salt dissolved in their blood, sweat
and tears. Salt which entered into living systems in days even
more remote than the Triassic when Hfe first enclosed its
blood streams in tlie midst of a briny sea.

As business men have packeted Cerebos, geologists, as wc
know, have packeted time. Here the Triassic has been for-
tunate. There is a distinction in the names of its two main
divisions of Bun ter and Keuper, names tliat might well have
been created for their characters by P. G. Wodchouse and
Aldous Huxley. There is richness of texture in the statement
that the Bunter Pebble Beds he between the Lower and
Upper Mottled Sandstone; somediing both vivid and droll
in the knowledge diat ii] Keuper days the hot red Bunter
deposits were succeeded by Tea Green Marls.

When I think of the Triassic lakes and seas, I am reminded
of the Ancient Mariner and see them beneath a bloody sun at
noon. ‘Yea slimy things did crawl with legs upon a slimy
sea. ’ Among them were the cutde-fish whose skeletons have
made diose slender, bullet-like fossils known as belemnites.
The water snakes, too, were there in the shape of the
ammonites which now coiled and swam in vast numbers.
They were able to take the place of the extinct graptolites as
die most sensitive time-keepers. Between each chamber of
the coiled shell are sutures as intricately fretted as those
dividing the sections of a human skull, and in their steady
evolution these lines can be deciphered almost as accurately
as though they were written records of die age in which each
creature lived.

Already there wxre a few of those savage reptiles, those sea

CREATION OF THE LOWLANDS

beasts of prey, the ichthyosaurs, whose fossil remains still
preserve a kind of caricature of their ancient ferocity. Their
eyes, ringed with bony plates, their long snouts g rinnin g
with teeth, they glare down from museum walls and seem to
promise that they were even more merciless hunters than the
clumsy monsters of the Devonian. They must have worked
havoc among the helpless shoals, though some at least of the
Triassic fish had a means of escape: the surface of the sea was
tom when a shoal of flying fish, trying to evade the snapping
jaws below, hurled themselves into the air and cut a gUtter-
ing arc through the heat.

When the sea invaded the Keuper lake from the south,
its gently encroaching waves swept up the accumulated
remains of untold generations of reptiles and fish, piling
them into beds which were soon peacefully buried by
the earliest deposits of another phase of sedimentation. In-
deed, ‘the gentle foundering of tlie Triassic landscape’
as this event has been described, was followed by further
sea periods that were to do as much to shape the English
Lowlands as previous ages had done to shape the mountain-
ous north and west.

During the Jurassic period, although the main trough of
Tethys still lay well to the south of the British region, the
part of it which always covered much of Europe extended
further west until once more the greater part of England was
under open sea, only the Highlands and part of East Anglia
remaining clear of it. It was this sea which created the so-
called Jurassic belt, the strip of country running diagonally
from Dorset to the moors of the North Riding. At the
base are the Liassic beds, often blue in colour and curi-
ously soft and muddy, and above it the oolitic limestones
in all the variety in which tliey occur between the Cotswolds

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and Lincoln Edge. Their counterpart and continuation in the
north is the sandstone of the Cleveland and Hambledon
Hills which raise their fine but austere scarps above the Vale
of York. The Jurassic belt was to have a powerful effect upon
the land once human settlement had begun. It provided the
one relatively open thoroughfare across central England, it
yielded the stones — Bath, Portland, and Purbcck marble —
that were to be quarried, carved and raised against the sky in
many of the most beautiful buildings men have ever made.
Now, latterly, the Lias is exerting its influence, for its
peculiar qualities make it an ideal material for cement — so
diat it may be said to have contributed to many of die ugliest
buildings men have ever made. Finally, the belt is full of
ironstone, which in Northamptonsliire, Lincolnshire and
Yorkshire has done to much to determine the pattern of
industrial development.

Of all places where meniory is deeply stirred, I should
choose Lyme Regis as the most potent. Walking between
die high, cnimbling cliffs and the sea, one is exposed to the
assault of time. The great depths of soft, grey-blue soil sug-
gest meniory itself To abandon oneself to them is like
moving in that smoky world which is reached by moving
among the images of the past stored in one’s own brain. And
there embedded in them are the perfect spirals of die
ammonites, the slender cones of bclemnites, and the glaring
eyes of ichtliyosaurs, to represent the vivid moments and the
cruel monsters of memory.

Perhaps I am particularly conscious of the power of Lyme
Regis because I was taken there when a very small child, and,
much awed by my surroundings and the strangeness of the
whole affair, was left to pick out Gryphaea (or Devil’s Toe
Nails, the shells diat had roused John Strange) while my

CREATION OF THE LOWLANDS

elders used their hammers to extricate bclemnites. It was, I
think, my first encounter with fossils in situ, and it made a
very deep impression on my imagination.

But if any recent memory haunts those mouldering cliffs,
it is the spirit of Miss Anning. Mary Anning was the daughter
of a carpenter at Lyme whose one claim to fame was a small
transaction with Jane Austen, an encounter which took place
when Mary was only five years old. Jane Austen, an honest
child-hater, probably looked with a cold eye on the future
‘most eminent female fossiHst’ w^iose limited fame would
have seemed even more improbable than her own trimnph.
Now both women arc a part of Lyme, an clement in die
place as real as the Cobb itself. Like Hugli Miller, Mary
Anning is a proof that even the simplest kind of creative
force is irresistible, that its possessors will always thrust them-
selves up through die mass of their fellows. Hers, if tradition
may be believed, was strangely come by. During a Lyme
horse-show a storm developed, and after a terrific flash of
lighming three people and a baby were seen lying on the
ground under an elm tree. The diree adults were dead, but
the baby, Mary Anning, ‘upon being put into warm water,
revived. She had been a dull child before, but after this
accident became lively and intelligent and grew up so.’
Lyme was already conscious of its proximity to the past; a
local fislmionger displayed million-ycar-old fishes on the slab
among the day’s catch, while Mr. Anning himself was an
established fossil hunter, often no doubt bringing back to his
shop the fragments of reptilian spines which were familiar
enough to have acquired the local name of ‘Verterberries’.
From very early years Mary went with him to the cliffs, and
when he died, she carried on the trade because she and her
family needed the money. In i8ii, nineteen years before the

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young Hugh Miller saw his first Devonian fish, this twelve-
year-old girl found the first complete ichthyosaur. In 1824
she made the earhest discovery of a plesiosaur and disposed of
it to the Duke of Buckingham (it has now come to rest in
South Kensington); in another two years she had un-
covered the first flying reptile or pterodactyl. Perhaps her
own favourite was a baby plesiosaur; writing to Dean
Buckland she commented with pleasure on the presence of
its coprolitc still resting on the pelvis and added that ‘the
neck has a most graceful curve’.

Mary Anning’s extraordinary record of discovery helped
to attract many of the great pioneers of geology to the little
resort. She was a lifelong friend of de la Bechc ; Lord Ennis-
killen and Sir Richard Owen used to scramble over the cliffs
with her, while Dean Buckland himself in his younger days
was often seen in her company ‘wading up to his knees in
search of fossils in the Blue Lias’. During a visit from
Roderick Murcliison, it is recorded that Mary Anning and
liis wife trudged along the beach with pattens on their feet.
Perhaps her greatest social triumph was a visit from the King
of Saxony; she wrote her name in his pocket book and
assured him that she ‘was well known throughout the whole
of Europe’. As is clear from her portrait, Mary Anning was
quite unaffected by such triumphs; she remained secure in
her own citadel, tlie simple woman who had made great
discoveries, who had recalled much from oblivion.

The Lias represents very fairly the character of the early
Jurassic seas, the muddy seas that later also deposited the
thicknesses of the dreary Oxford and Kimmeridge Clays.
At its southernmost extent, this latter formation included a
bituminous shale known as Kimmeridge Coal. I remember
an occasion when, mysteriously, a bed of this shale caught

CREATION OF THE LOWLANDS

fire underground, and the newspapers were full of infernal
tales of smoke belching from meadows and Enghsh hedges
falling into ash overnight.

Near the village of Kimmeridge, both before and during
the Roman occupation, the hard black shale was lathe-
turned to make bracelets. It was a thriving local trade, and
the bracelets were sold widely throughout the country.
More recently the people living round Kimmeridge were
puzzled by the small black discs that they sometimes turned
up in their fields and gardens. They gave diem the name of
Kimmeridge money and beUeved them to have been the
currency of some fabulous race whidi had held the land
before them. Now it has been discovered that these discs fell
from the centre of the shale rings when they were being cut
into bracelets.

The Jurassic seas were not persistendy muddy. The clays
and shales alternate with beds of limestone which were laid
down in warm and shallow water, full of corals and deUcate
sea-hhes — and where for the first time crabs steered their
diagonal comscs across the floors. These floors woidd have
had a sandy appearance — but it was no ordinary sand. The
oohtes of wliich the Jurassic limestone are so largely com-
posed, are, as their name suggests, tiny spherical particles
often resembhng the hard roe of a herring. Each oohte has
its own complex structure, concentric layers of calcite or
aragonite wrapped pearl-like round a speck of broken shell
or quartz. How many milliard of these minute spheres are
massed in the Jurassic belt is as idle a speculation as an estim-
ate of the number of stars in the universe. We need only be
grateful fbr the tenacity with which they hold together when
we expose them in the walls of our buildings (if the builders
arc not careless and ignorant as they were at Oxford) and for

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the colours and texture they assume on exposure. I shall
trespass on the next chapter and say that the Bath, Portland
and other less fine but lovely oolitic building stones
form a living relationship between the Jurassic Age, the
eighteenth century and ourselves, its latest inheritors.
English eighteenth century architecture could not have
achieved some of its highest felicities witliout this ideal
material.

The age has a smaller and more fantastic bond with the
medieval builders. Towards its end sedimentation and chang-
ing levels had formed a fresh-water lagoon in the Dorset area
whose weedy floor was thick with the water snail Viviparus,
Their coiled shells accumulated in vast numbers to form the
dark green Purbeck marble that the medieval masons loved
to cut and polish into slender columns. So Jurassic w'ater
snails, their individual lives commemorated by murky
scribings on the sinfacc of the marble, liclped medieval
Christians to praise their God.

The land surrounding these lakes and lagoons was heavy
with vegetation and abounding with animal life. The forests
as well as the long-established fern trees now included many
conifers, the pretty maidenhair trees and, perhaps common-
est of all, the cycads with their immensely long fronds, like
glossy green feathers. There were still no true flowers, but
the cycads bore cones which when open looked very much
hke large blossoms. So striking is this flower-like appearance
of the fossilized cones diat where they occur in the sand-
stones of the Yorkshire coast they arc known as cliff roses.
This unexpected local name calls attention to the incon-
gruousness of tropical palms, their smooth fronds glistening
in the sun, flourishing in what is now an austere northern
country. Something more can be added to the scene while

CREATION OF THE LOWLANDS

it Still hangs there, miragc-like, in the mind’s eye. It might
be that flapping clumsily among the cycads, or perching
above them on the Ginkgo trees, creatures would be visible
that could only be described as birds. Their long flexible
tails, the toothed jaws that took the place of beaks, and long
claws protruding from the wings to support these still
ratlier incompetent aviators show that they are only just
drawing clear of their reptilian inheritance. But unmistak-
ably the scales have frilled into feathers, and the feathers
grow in coverts along the wings, round the tails and
even in daring little crests at the back of the head. A creature
that flies on feathered wings must be allowed to be a bird.
Inevitably the senses are demanding of the imagination,
‘Has it colour.^’ But the imagination, with no more to work
upon tlian a poor tangled skeleton lying among delicate
tissues of feather impressions in the grey monochrome of the
limestone, admits itself defeated. Had the excitement and
rivalry of courtship as yet caught up the chemical con-
stituents needed to colour featlicrs — at least enough to put a
gleam of red or blue into that narrow crest? Had the
jubilation of successful mating and the wider prospects of
lagoon and sky gained from the tree-tops as yet shaped the
throat and tongue of Archaeopteryx to give it a voice? A
shriek no harsher than that of a guinea-fowl or a chatter no
less birdlike than the laughter of a yaffle? Recalling again the
relics of brittle bodies tumbled in mud, it is clear diat there
can be no answer. It can only be said with certainty that the
germs of colour and song were there, forming far down in
the vortex of time and waiting to issue in the plumage and
calls of the plover I watched above the Norfolk furrows. It
is certain, too, tliat the potentialities lay with Archaeopteryx
and not with the leathery winged pterodactyls, like cold-

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blooded bats, and the other flying reptiles which were to
achieve a temporary success in the following age.

This was the day of reptile imperialism. While plesiosaurs
and ichthyosaurs were ruling the oceans and these other
hopeful reptilian experiments were being followed in the air,
the land reptiles had already passed the bounds of present
probability. No twentieth century nightmare, no poetic
imagination however macabre, could produce anything so
magnificently fantastic as die reptiles of the Jurassic and
Cretaceous worlds. They grew into every opening, every
cranny of opportunity offered them by an unexploited land.
There were dinosaurs that lumbered like rhinoceroses or ran
fleedy as ostriches on land, there were others that waded
through swamps, that went on two legs tearing branches
from trees or limbs from one another. Some were smooth
and imctuous as sealions, some were armour-plated and
many were exuberant with a variety of spines and horns.
Whether the masterpiece in sheer size, the ninety-foot,
kitten-brained diplodocus, ever Uved in Britain is not known ;
it is not surprising that it throve in America. Why do not
Americans put up a hfe-size monument to the all-time
record in life size?

Our land was certainly trodden by the stegosaurs, which
may never have exceeded thirty feet in length but made up
for it with the most extraordinary armour of any of the
dinosaurs. Bony plates shaped like the ears of an AfHcan
elephant were very inefficiendy attached on edge along the
hiunped back of the monster; along the tail they gave way
to pairs of ferocious-looking spikes. The greater part of the
ten tons of body remained entirely vulnerable — the crest of
plates was useless and it seems that the tail could not be
swimg freely enough to give much ofiensive power to the

CREATION OF THE LOWLANDS

spikes. In truth, Stegosaurus was a mild harmless creature
which liked to wander along the edge of lagoons nibbling
succulent plants and idly snapping at dragonflies. It makes me
think of some childUke scholar who has lost his wits, and
having hung himself with tin trays and saucepan Hds as a
protection against his critics, strays through the rest of his
life eating ice-cream and sipping creme de menthe. As for the
consciousness centred in its tiny head, it must have registered
the sharp outHne of the dragonflies and leaves, the rich smell
of the lagoon, and the squelching and splashing of other
dinosaurs feeding in mud and shallow water. Fleeting, tmeo-
ordinated images hke the projection of transparencies on
drifting clouds.

The truth is that Stegosaurus and most of its contempor-
aries were among the luxurious forms of life, possible only
in a world still fresh enough to support such extravagance.
In their natural world, they were the equivalent of the
Egyptian pharaohs who in the early days of the social world
could afford to build the Pyramids to cover the httle rem-
nants of their dead bodies.

The Jurassic Age had carried the slow building of Britain
as far as the scarplands that form the southern boundary of
the Midlands ; by the end of the Cretaceous Age much of the
rest of the land had been prepared for its last shaping. With-
out Chalk there could be no Albion, and there would have
been no Chalk vrithout the Cretaceous seas.

It was a revolutionary epoch. The whole of the earth was
moving fast towards not indeed its final form, but the form
which we creatures of time cannot help regarding as final.
The once narrow belt of Tethys now extended over much of
Atlantis and was beginning to look like the Atlantic. Gond-
wanaland had shrunk to a land mass running from South

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America to Africa; Australia, now isolated, did not greatly
differ from the present island.

Britain still belonged to North America, to Atlantis, but
already jaws of the oceans were waiting to close between
Greenland and Europe and so to transfer the future allegiance
of these islands to the European continent. At first much of
Britain was land, though the Purbeck lagoon, after becom-
ing the Wealden Lake, was invaded by the sea which
deposited the Lower Greensand so conspicuous in the scen-
ery of the Home Counties, where it is responsible for Leith
Hill, die greatest eminence of that moderate countryside. It
also laid down the Gault, an old word wonderfully expres-
sive of the stiff clay, like bluish soap, for which its stands. At
this time, as so often before, a distinct inlet of the sea covered
northern England; it was bounded on the south by thc*old
central land ridge running from the Welsh mountains south-
eastward by way of Charnwood Forest towards London. In
this northern sea was formed the Red Chalk now exposed in
the cliffs at Hunstanton. As surely as migrant birds, Cam-
bridge children go to Hunstanton for their various conva-
lescences, and there they arc confronted with this spectacular
piece of geological poster-painting, a cliff which is half red
and half white like the sponge sandwiches at their tea parties.

During the Cretaceous Age tlie sea was rising until at the
height of this, its last great transgression over our land, it left
only the Welsh and Scottish highlands uncovered. Its waters
may have closed for a time even above Snowdon.

For tliirty million years this sea remained almost constant
and at the rate of one foot in thirty thousand years, the chalk
mounted layer by layer on its bed. The arithmetic is simple,
but the reality of the fact hard to grasp. If, enjoying the sun,
a child leans against the cliff at Folkestone, his small figure

A l l V(.l) HJSSII IISH

Enanjcl-scalcd fish (see p. 59)

1 PI am: v(h) |■■os.su i ish

There imist have been a horrible Happiiii; and floundering . , (sec p. no)

CREATION OF THE LOWtANDS

will span the accumulation of one hundred and twenty
thousand years. And yet, knowing this, still my imagination
will so speed up the process that I see it as a marine snow-
storm, the falling of flakes through one of the clearest seas
ever known. It was so clear because the surrounding lands
were already worn down, had reached a position of rest and
were no longer shedding muddy sediments. The rivers did,
however, carry pure calcium carbonate in solution, and it
was the chemical activity of microscopic marine plants that
caused the deposition of this calcium as Chalk. Often it was
so pure that hardly any refinement is necessary to make those
white fingers which teachers use for their blackboard
demonstrations, and which turn into the clouds of white
dust so characteristic of the lower forms of scholastic hfe. If
my imagination were reasonable, it would see these clouds
rather than snowstorms blowing down through the
Cretaceous oceans.

The palhd sea-floor and the warm shallow water above it
were full of elegant life — starfish, lobsters, sea-urchins,
sponges and the pearly shells of ammonites that were
already assuming many bizarre and decadent forms. The
swarms of fish now included herring, and it is remarkable to
be able to look at their hairlike bones and feel only aesthetic
pleasure at the exquisite delicacy of the fossil.

Many of the sponges were silicious species, resembling the
glass sponges called Venus’s Flower Baskets. The silica of
their skeletons, concentrating into nodules, formed the beds
of flint seaming the Chalk which later were to be pursued
by the shafts and galleries of the first miners in Britain.

The reptiles still commanded all the elements, their
kitten-brains untroubled by premonitions of approaching
defoat. In the air the pterodactyls had attained a wing
F 8i

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span of twenty feet, but, like our gliders, they had to find a
cliff or other high ground from which to launch themselves
into the air. Life in the coastal waters must have been
momentarily dimmed by the passing shadow of enormous
wings as the pterodactyls wheeled and glided in search of
fish — often no doubt the luckless herring that had adapted
extreme fecundity as the simplest form of defence. In the sea
the largest and most sinister of the reptiles were the mosa-
saurs, dieir bodies long and sinuous, their sharp jaws filled
with teeth. In striking formal contrast with these authentic
sea-serpents, giant tmtles pursued the shoals with deft,
gentle strokes of their flippers. Held in the balance of the
water, turtles seem infinitely gentle, dehberate; but their
homy beaks are as pitiless as an eagle’s.

On land the rule of the dinosaurs had not yet been chal-
lenged. Indeed, Tyrannosaurus represents the physical force
of hfe at its most brutal. The official description is: ‘ Tyran-
nosaurus, the greatest of flesh-eating types, when standing
was nearly twenty feet high. Its total length was nearly forty
feet; it had fangs six inches long, and powerful claws for
holding down its prey.’ This monster, blood running from
its gorged mouth, is a symbol for that energy in life furthest
removed from the sensitive receptivity of consciousness; two
forces so much opposed must, perhaps, be necessary to one
another. Certainly the thundering of Tyrannosaurus has not
yet been silenced.

Held in check by the great reptiles, the mammals remained
modest in size and discreet in habit. They were, however,
improving their eflSciency, for by the end of Cretaceous
times they had perfected the placenta, the ingenious device
enabling the embryo to share its mother’s blood stream.
Women seem always to have frit the strangeness of the caul

CREATION OP THE LOWLANDS

and have made it the centre of old wives’ laws and magical
practices. In Egypt the pharaoh’s placenta was deified and,
wrapped in cloth, was carried before him on all state
occasions.

It was vegetable life which with blind, irresistible inno-
cence was preparing the way for further changes and for
the emergence of the world we experience. During the
Cretaceous period the old vegetation of tlie coal forests, the
shining cycads and the fern trees, was being supplanted by
deciduous trees and plants which could put out true flowers.
With inexplicable speed it happened; the flowers and the
pollinating insects with their urgent mutual eros drawing
one another into being — the insects creating coloured petals,
honey, seductive scents; the flowers strengthening wings and
charging small bodies with an intense energy.

By the end of the Cretaceous Age, which was also the end
of the one hundred and twenty-five million years of the
Mesozoic era, the transformation was complete. On the soil
of Devon and Cornwall and those western parts of Britain
comprising the shores of the Chalk-forming sea, there now
grew fig, magnoha, poplar and plane. Widi the coming of
these flowering and deciduous shrubs and trees the full
seasonal rhythm was for the first time established. The
rhythm that was later to be caught up in the human
consciousness and so to put out its own blossoms, all the
myths of the young dying god, the flowers of the garden of
Adonis.

With the opening of the Caenozoic, the third great
geological era, the play between land and sea had at last
given the continents roughly their present form. Australia
was there although the East Indies were under the Pacific;
Africa was there though attenuated and with a peninsula

A LAND

jutting out westward towards South America. The western
limb of Tethys was now quite plainly the Adantic Ocean,
but was linked with the Pacific across Central America. The
greatest differences were in Europe and Asia, where the
swollen eastern limb of Tethys linked the Adantic with the
Indian Ocean, covering Southern Europe and the Middle
East and the whole of India. When for a time an extension
from Tethys spread northward to the Arctic and so cut off
Europe fi-om Asia, all the continents of the world were
isolated.

As for Britain, the region still belonged as much to North
America as to Europe, for it lay at the south-eastern extrem-
ity of a land mass running by Iceland and Greenland to unite
with the northern extremity of Canada. It was separated
from Europe by a relatively narrow sea overlying all
southern England with the exception of the Wcaldon
dome. This remained intact, rising from the sea .as an
oval island of Chalk. Deposition was taking place only in
the hollows on either side of this dome — ^in Essex and die
Thames valley to the north, and to the south in west Sussex,
Hampshire, the east side of Dorset and die north side of the
Isle of Wight — the hollow known as the Hampshire basin.
A large river draining the western continent flowed into this
sea, probably in the neighbourhood of central Devon. From
time to time the Wealden dome humped a little higher, and
as the troughs were correspondingly depressed, there Sal-
lowed an influx of the sea. As a result of these two opposite
forces — of the river and of the inflowing sea — ^in both the
northern and the southern troughs silts washed down by the
river alternate with marine beds, each trailing off into the
other. Among the latter is the London Clay that swells up
beside me as Primrose Hill and supports so many London

CREATION OF THE LOWLANDS

gardens as well as my own. Immediately above it, the river
laid down the Bagshot Sands that make those ‘villainous
heaths’ of Bagshot abused by Cobbett and where business
men, who are not interested in the fcrtiUty of die soil, now
build their weekend Tudor homes.

This pattern of south-eastern England did not outlast die
first half of the Caenozoic era. Already by the end of the
Miocene, if not before, the Wealden dome had been des-
troyed. The Chalk vault, having been raised beyond cracking
point, broke up and was carried away. It left its roots, the
North and South Downs, enclosing the eroded edges of the
underlying Jurassic and Cretaceous formations. Among
these die soluble clay beds inevitably eroded most rapidly,
leaving the sands, particularly the Greensands and the older
deposits of the central core round Ashdown Forest, as
conspicuous ridges. This erosion also exposed a few still
harder masses, such as the High Rocks of Tunbridge Wells,
which seem almost uncanny because altogether out of place
in die mild countryside of Kent.

From the beginning of the era, and reaching a climax in the
Miocene Age, the earth’s crust suffered its last violent dis-
turbances. From Europe to China along the line of the
ancient trough of Tethys the sedimentary rocks were folded
into tremendous mountain langcs. Created no more than
thirty million years ago, they are still lofiy and jagged, form-
ing that backbone of the ancient world which includes the
Alps and the Himalayas.

Tethys, its old bed so violendy destroyed, shrank towards
die present limits of the Mediterranean, while on their
northern flank the new ranges imprisoned a sea that in time
broke into pieces, of which the Black and Caspian Seas and
the Aral and smaller lakes still survive.

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The British regionl ay far enough to the west to escape the
main force of the folding. The upheaval that raised Mont
Blanc and Everest was so far expended that in Britain it did
little more directly than lift the mild Portsdown Hills, tip
up the Chalk forming the Isle of Purbcck, the Needles and
the continuing crest of the Isle of Wight, and raise the nob of
Chalk on which Windsor Castle stands. But indirectly
this Alpine folding had a more powerful influence on the
future British Isles. When the shock responsible for the small
buddings in southern England reached the hard rocks of the
north, these rocks resisted, and, in resisting, cracked. Always
ready for such opportunities, the molten stuff below boiled
through the cracks and spread wide fields of basalt from
Ulster to Mull and Skye. Where it faded to flow out freely
the lava thrust into the vertical cracks and often spread
horizontally also, finding weak places between the sedimen-
tary beds. In parts of southern Scotland, little volcanoes
erupted, and the cones having been eroded, the plugs of lava
solidified in tlie central channel now forming the rocky
eminences, or laws, such as those on which the castles of
Stirling and Edinburgh have been built. Now, too, as
always before in periods of volcanic activity, in places where
the sedinientary rocks had been weakened, tlie partially
molten upper magma pushed up into the hollows and there
set as granite. In this way the Mounie mountains were
formed, the Coolins of Skye, and probably also Goatfell in
Arran.

After this miniature landscape gardening (for such it seems
by comparison with continental Alpine convulsion) the main
tructure of our land was complete by die close of the
Miocene Age. The remaining dozen miUion years only
modified the design. There was erosion, cutting and smooth-

CREATION OF THE LOWtANDS

ing and some moving of surface deposits by icesheets and
glaciers; there was the approach of the sea towards our
present coastline.

Before the grip of the Ice Age fastened on Europe, some
further additions were still to be made to the substance of
Britain. During the earUer part of the Phocene period the
sea in southern England stood several hundred feet above its
present level, and as a result there was a trough along the line
of the Thames valley that may have been united with an
inlet of the Bristol Chaimel. The gravelly beaches it left
behind still chng high up on the North Downs, making httle
islands of heath. Where the race-horses gallop on the smooth
chaUc of Epsom Dovms, heather, bracken and birch trees
flourish not far away on Headley Heath — ^a relic of Pliocene
seas. The gravels of rather later seas show on the Chiltems
and on the outskirts of London where it is only the poverty
of their soils that have preserved the precious open spaces of
Hampstead and Highgate from cultivation and develop-
ment.

In the south-west the granite masses of Dartmoor and
Bodmin Moor and the sandstone upland of Exmoor were
islands in a sea engaged in smoothing the siurrounding
lands, especially that part of diem destined to become Corn-
wall. That ohvc green, imdulating coimtry of die peninsula,
whose feeling is exquisitely conveyed in small comers of
some of Ben Nicholson’s paintings, was worn smooth by
die Pliocene sea. Since then the land level has risen four or
five hundred feet, and, as Cornwall was untouched by ice,
its rivers are cutting down beds diat stiU fall sharply to the
sea. Human beings are, it seems, irresistibly attracted to those
places where nature has not become passive but is still full of
force and the possibiUty of movement. One of the most

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visited of such places is Rocky Valley, near Tintagel, where
the stream falls in a number of cascades, each hollowing a
round basin at its foot.

I once had an experience there which, tliough it seemed
slight enough, has remained in my mind with a brightness
and tenacity that suggest some special significance. I remem-
ber how I walked through the sadly coloured countryside,
where the whitewashed cottages were roofed with huge
sheets of the local flagstone. I went past the headland that
cloudy memories have associated with King Arthur, and
where, certainly, Celtic monks meditated on God as the
Atlantic spray blew across their cabins. Scrambling down
the steep sides of Rocky Valley, I saw a dipper and followed
its flight until I found I was looking down into one of the
deepest of the rock basins. My inner eye can still project
the spectacle with the clarity of a coloured lantern sUde.
The white plume of the cascade fell from a height into
a basin shadowy below but full of sun in its upper parts;
a hght spume blowing off the spray held a miniature
rainbow that bridged the shadows of the lower basin. In a
narrow fissure, wet with spume, was the dipper’s nest with
its neat domed roof and an opening at the side which seemed
too small to allow the passage of the sleek body of the bird.
Immediately below the nest, imprisoned in tlic smaller
basin made by the fissure, a large and brilliantly coloured
rubber ball rose and fell and spun round with the seething
of the water. Through the opening of the nest I could
see the dipper’s eye fixed upon me, and the roaring of
the fall seemed to enclose me in this small, intense
and perfectly incongruous world. Twenty years before
I had held a ball of that kind in my hands and looked
with love at its bright red and green paint; millions of

CREATION OF THE LOWiANDS

years from now the river will have levelled Rocky Valley,
will have grown tame and shed its rainbows. These are
chance comments; the image can be interpreted as one
will.

One other region escaped erosion and gained some further
deposits before the beginning of die Ice Age. This was in
East Anglia where the Pliocene seas retreating north-east-
wards laid down the shelly sands of the Red Crag as well as
the older Coralline Crag, which is almost wholly composed
of die remains of floating colonics of bryzoa, or sea-mats.
As the seas withdrew still further, it seems the lowest reaches
of the river Rhine flowed across eastern Suffolk and
Norfolk, and deposited some of the other East Anglian
crags. Possibly the so-called Chillesford Beds mark the
actual course of the river where it ran through many
bends to a mouth in the North Sea. Finally, before the whole
countryside was overwhelmed by icesheets, forest and peat
bogs formed the Cromer Forest Bed, a curious and con-
spicuous survival. In die cliffs near the resort, its dark brown
band stands out clearly under the overlying masses of the
glacial drifts. From it anyone can pick out the relics of
Pliocene bogs — blackened sticks and leaves and innumerable
tiny white shells. Between its two peat beds He the
rehes of elephant, rhinoceros, hippotamus and sabre-toothed
tiger. A child playing on the beach could pick up one
of these fragments and drop it in his bucket together
with a live starfish — a species wliich struck out its shape
in the world long before these mammals and has long
outlasted them.

The animals of the Cromer Forest Bed (I wish they might
have their resurrection day, step from the cliffs and process
through the town like circus beasts) belong to the end of the

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Tertiary era; the rise of the maranials at the beginning of
that era and the extinction of the giant Cretaceous reptiles is
one of the most dramatic events to be recorded in these
memoirs.

Tyrannosaurus and the iguanodons, the gigantic ptero-
dactyls and the mososaurs seemed secure in their rule of land,
air and sea. The small furry mammals that had been con-
ducting their affairs so hmnbly since Permian times, often
crunched Hke salted almonds in colossal jaws or hurled to
limbo by a carelessly swung tail, even late in the Cretaceous
still appeared to have notliing on their side. Yet by the late
Eocene the large reptiles had disappeared, leaving only bones
to awaken future memories, while the maxnmals had leapt
to fill their lebensraum with an extraordinary exuberance.
Like flowers and vegetables planted for the first time in
virgin soil, they acliieved at once their most extravagant
forms. Indeed, they nearly rivalled the fantastic excesses of
the reptiles, and hke the reptiles these early mammals have
died out and left no descendants. Many of them were
elephantine or rhinocerine in appearance, and their skulls,
overloaded with great bony knobs and horns, had so much
the less room for brains.

Meanwhile, however, the ancestors of most modem
species were establishing themselves; with unconscious wis-
dom they avoided high speciaHzation, remaining lightly
armoured and small in size. The forebears of our cows and
horses, for example, were about the size of fox terriers,
although already their hoofs were moving towards those
cleft and single forms whose prints in mud or dust small
children always love to distinguish. The smaller reptiles had
not been ousted with their megalomaniac kin. There were
alligators and turtles in English rivers, tortoises were begin-

CREATION OF THE LOWLANDS

ning their cautious career on land. Indeed, in Eocene times,
when that dreary deposit the London Clay was being laid
down, the cHmate was tropical. Our seas swarmed with
sharks and their shores were fringed with palm trees and
other tropical evergreens whose leaves are found preserved
in the cliffs of the Isle of Wight and Bournemouth.
(Visitors sheltering from the rain at Alum Bay or
Blackgang Chine may like to dream of the steady blue
skies of Eocene summers.) Piles of die fruit of Nipa
palms, now surviving in Malayan swamps, drifted into
the mud that has formed the London Clay of the Isle of
Sheppey.

Further north the climate was more temperate and Scot-
land was clodicd with deciduous trees such as plane and oak,
as well as conifers and maidcnliairs.

Climbing, leaping and chattering in die tropical vegeta-
tion of southern England, nibbling fruits and insects, there
were already early representatives of the primates ; descended
from tree shrews, and related to the lemurs and tarsiers,
they were remotely ancestral to ourselves.

The convulsions of die Miocene Age probably speeded the
swing of the cUmate to the much cooler conditions pre-
vaihng by the end of the Caenozoic era. In the woods and
grassland of that time the mammals still flourished, although
they may have passed die zenith of their strength and
variety. In southern and eastern England the open country
of the PHocene supported herds of horses (now grown to the
size of very small ponies) antelopes, gazelles, and many kinds
of elephant, including mastodon. In the woods there were
deer and monkeys. The carnivore of these days now most
notorious among us is surely the sabre-toothed tiger. To
make it as ferocious as possible, and to display the long

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&ngs to their best advantage, illustrators always show this
beast with its mouth wide open, so wide open that one
might beheve it to be dislocated. I have never seen a picture
of a sabre-toothed tiger with its mouth shut, and I suspect
that many people must assume that diey never were shut,
but were fixed in a monstrous snarl like those stiU occasion-
ally to be seen in the stuflcd heads of tiger-skin rugs on the
floors of country houses.

Among all the mammals which were making experiments
in Uving before the Ice Age, the primates were proving most
successful. It seems that man, like the elephant, originated in
Africa. Manlike apes, such as the decorously named species.
Proconsul, evolved in the continent which their descendants
were to call dark. In Africa, too, cros so strengthened tlieir
mounting consciousness that diese creatures began to use,
and even to shape, sticks and stones to help them to secure
and prepare their food. Consciousness was concentrating
itself in their still simian skulls. First life and now conscious-
ness had grown from that pre-Cambrian planet of granite
and water. As colours intensified in birds and then in
flowers, so consciousness was intensifying through the apes,
the man-like apes and primitive man. After this point there
was no going back, the development of the human mind,
the isolation of the human being lay at the end of the road
that was then chosen. Yet even now the citadels of individual
self-consciousness are always being stormed by death, and
even in Ufe we surrender them every day to sleep. It seems
a part of some urge to reverse the process of intensification,
to let mind return to its matrix. Sometimes when I am
tired and consumed by a longing for sleep, a gentle but
irresistible invasion from the outer world seems to take
possession of me and I feel that consciousness wishes only

CRIATION OF THE LOWIANDS

to flow back into that world and dissolve there. Rilke wrote
of ‘gold’:

The ore is homesick. It is eager
to leave the mints and turning wheels
that offer it a life so meagre
from coffers and from factories
It would flow back into the veins
of gaping mountains whence it came,
that close upon it onu again.

From the end of the Caenozoic it was too late, conscious-
ness was bound, at least for a spell, to the coffers and the
factories.

When the temperate climate of Pliocene times was giving
way before the intense cold of the Pleistocene Ice Age the
transfer of Britain’s geographical allegiance from the North
American continent to Europe was complete. The British
area formed a bulge on the western extremity of a
European continent, while the sea had made its decisive
break between it and Greenland. Ireland was already cut off,
and lay as an island off the coast of the bulge.

It is now almost as familiar as 1066 that ‘the Ice Age may
be divided into four main glacial periods divided by warmer
interglacials’. At the first onset of the cold, vast icesheets
reached Britain from Scandinavia, but in the later cold
phases the icesheets and glaciers were home-produced,
originating in the mountains of Wales, north-eastern
England and Scotland. The ice attained its greatest extent
during the second glaciation when its southern limits ran
from the mouth of the Severn to the north side of the mouth
of the Thames. Even at this time the stout bulk of the Cleve-
land hi ll s probably made a barrier showing as a grim black
island against the glistening expanse of the glacier. Never
again did the ice extend so far to the south. Nor in its later

A LAND

advances did it present a solid front, but pushed down in
three tongues, one along the west side of the Pennines, a
smaller central one down the vale of York, and a massive
eastern tongue most of which overlay the present North Sea
but which extended down the eastern half of Yorkshire and
Lincolnshire, its tip reaching as far as Norfolk.

During these later glaciations, by damming the natural
outlet of nortliward-flowing rivers, die ice formed a num-
ber of large lakes, all of which have left their mark on the
country. The imprisoned waters of the Trent and Yorkshire
Ouse made Lake Humber, a great bleak expanse of water
running from central Yorkshire right down into the Mid-
lands, while beside it an equally large Fenland lake was filled
by the rivers that should have drained into the Wash. The
Derwent ponded up in the Vale of Pickering, where its
waters washed the southern scarp of the North Riding hills.
This Lake Pickering at last forced a new outlet to the south,
a course still followed by the Derwent, which, although it
rises only a few hundred yards from the North Sea, flows
slowly down to the Yorksliire Ouse and so into the Humber.
The lake itself has left its traces where die floor of die Vale of
Pickering remains waterlogged and peaty. Away to the west
of the Pennines the last of these glacial lakes was formed by
the ponded waters of the Dee that spread over much of the
country round and to the north of Shrewsbury. Here, too,
the future course of one of our greatest rivers was affected,
for the pressure of the lake cut the famous gorge of the
Severn at Ironbridge and so assured the oddly bent course of
the future river. While all the other lakes, Humber, Fen-
land and Pickering, have regional names, this one has been
called Lake Lapworth after the well-known Birmingham
geologist. So an icy expanse of water, anonymous while it

CREATION OF THE LOWLANDS

existed, will now always be known by the name of a dead
man.

The land that had been a patch of the sea-bed, that had
been lifted into lofty ranges and worn down again, that had
supported lagoons and coral atolls, that had been heavy with
tropical vegetation and then again desert, was now hidden
xmder ice and snow. Soil burnt red by a pitiless sun was now
in harsh contact with the white cutting edge of the ice. In
winter the land lay rigid under the frost, in smnmer it was
furrowed by turbulent glacial streams, heavy with the grits,
pebbles and boulders which they were carrying from tlie
melting edge of the ice to spread them in wide fans over the
surrounding country. Stand at Moreton-in-die-Marsh, in
that sweet, mild, agricultural coimtry of the Cotswolds, and
imagine it as the meeting place of two gigantic glaciers, one
thrusting eastward from Wales, the other advancing against
it from the Midlands. Or stand where the traffic roars dovra
Finchley Road and see it instead filled by the ragged tip of
the most southerly of the glaciers: from desolation to desola-
tion.

Although the bony structure and most of the flesh parts of
Britain were created before the Ice Age, these glaciations, as
the last major event before men began their own trans-
formation of the land, added many of the superficial
features on which men had to work. In the mountains
glaciers drove down the valleys fike a gouge, deepening and
rounding their bottoms and often leaving the tributary
valleys cut off so high above that their streams now fall in
graceful waterfalls to the main river. In lowland country, the
ice was a great leveller, grinding away all precarious oddities
as a social democracy levels its eccentrics. It reduced the face
of the land to gentle, sometimes monotonous, imdulations,

A LAND

broken only where the haadest igneons rocks were able to
resist the ice. Often on the lee of one of these volcanic
barriers a sloping ramp of deposits would accumulate below
the ice just as a talus of sand forms behind a w'ave-swept
stone. Up such a glacial ramp the Royal Mile leads to
Edinburgh Castle — itself clamped to the solidified core of a
Miocene volcano.

The action at the head of a valley was very different. There
the root of the glacier clawed at the mountain from which it
sprang, plucking at its flank until a precipice was formed,
and grouting a rocky basin at its foot. This was the origin of
those mysterious and romantic mountain lakes, the cwms
and corries of Wales and Scodand, whose stillness seems to
be enhanced by the savage crags above them. Their brood-
ing emotional quality, their power to heighten a sense of
solitude, has always drawn romantic painters to these glacial
lakes, and so they arc recreated through Wilson, Girtin,
Piper.

While icesheets and glaciers that were advancing or
maintainin g themselves gouged and ground away the soft
parts of the land, in retreat they played an opposite role.
When they melted they left ridges of boulders, stone and
soil along their edge, while from beneath them they let
fall blankets of clay and stones that muffled the face of the
coimtryside. Sometimes, as well as these even blankets of
boulder clay, the ice left the pear-shaped mounds called
drumlins which arc among the most regular of natural for-
mations. In some Yorkshire dales where the drumlins lie
along the valley bottom like a flock of giant sheep, each one
carries a bam on its back built there to escape floods; large
ones have been used as natural mottes for castles.

The joke about Dr. Spooner and erotic blacks has made

CREATION Of rm-; loweands

many people familiar with the idea of erratic blocks.
Glaciers and floating icebergs often carried fragments of rock
far from their place of origin and dropped them in alien sur-
roundings, sometimes perched in odd and precarious
positions. Shap granite from the Lake District is found on
the east side of the Pemiines, granite from the Cheviots has
come to rest in southern England, icebergs carried Welsh
and Irish rocks as far as die Scilly Isles, while die first glacia-
tion brought us fragments tom from Norwegian mountain
ranges.

Britain still shows the marks of a recent glaciation, most
clearly in innumerable bogs and meres that have been
formed by interference with die natural lines of drainage or
by the existence of wide hollows scooped out by the ice.
The Cheshire Plain, for instance, with its scatter of meres, is
plainly country from wliich the ice has only recently with-
drawn. The warm spell in which we are hving has not yet
lasted for more than a small fraction of one of die inter-
glacials of the Ice Age. Perhaps as a respite from our brief
anxieties we might reflect on this simple statement taken
from an official handbook: ‘Judging from the past the exist-
ence of ice in the polar regions at the present day is abnormal.
It is uncertain whether in the course of the next ten or twenty
thousand years all polar and arctic ice will disappear, or
whether it will become more extensive, and parts of the
northern hemisphere be once again covered by ice.’

It was about twenty thousand years ago when for the last
time the ice sheets and glaciers began to contract. Each year
the winter’s freezing failed quite to overtake the summer’s
thaw. From time to time the retreat was checked and the ice
remained stationary for centuries; but always it was resumed
until the icesheets reached their present ‘abnormal’ limits

A tAND

round the North Pole, and the glaciers disappeared from
all but the Alps and the highest Scandinavian mountains.

HaAdng been freed from tlie ice, Britain passed in the
course of time through those phases of vegetation that can
still be encountered in the sequence of geographical zones.
At first, while the climate remained bitterly cold, open
tundra prevailed with its scatter of willow, birch and pine;
later this was invaded by a much denser growth of pine, and
finally the gloomy evergreen forests were themselves super-
seded by the fresher green of oak, elm and lime. The beech,
now such a lovely and characteristic part of southern
England, was the latest arrival among the deciduous trees;
it was still rare in this country until two or three thousand
years ago.

Possibly the warming of the climate which caused the
change from pine to mixed oak forest was itself due to
the final isolation of Britain from the continent. This
severance, by allowing the free circulation of the warmer
water from the west, would have helped to shield Britain
from the severe continental cUmate and to bring instead
warm, moist Atlantic conditions.

Certainly these two developments which are now so
essential a part of the character of the country, its isolation
and its clothing in fresh green vegetation, took place at much
the same time. After about 6000 b.c. the greatest changes in
the personality of Britain were to be made by men.

In these two chapters I have recalled something of the
creation of the land of Britain during five hundred million
years. Piece by piece through all the changes of time the
stufi* of Britain has accumulated and has been carved to its
present shape — piece by piece, advancing always from the
ancient rocks of the north-west to the young clays, sands and

CREATION OF THE LOWLANDS

gravels of the south--east. At the end of it, no country has a
more complex structure and more various scenery than our
own.

Together with this creation of a country I have recalled
the strengthening of consciousness to the point at which in
the mind of man it was ready to turn upon the land that had
nourished it.

Apart from the few great upheavals in the earth’s crust,
natural change can never have had so rapid or so con-
spicuous an effect as those wrought by men during the last
ten thousand years. From their first tentative experiments at
felling trees with flint axes, diey have cleared whole regions
of forest, have made lakes, drained fens and changed the
course of rivers, they have honeycombed the Carboniferous
strata and burnt much of them, they have plundered the
accumulations of many ages and used the plunder to cover
the surface of the country with roads, houses and cities. They
have changed plants and animals to serve their own ends
with ten diousand times the speed of evolution, and, by
substituting these creations of their own for the natural
animals and vegetation, have completed the transformation
of the land.

CHAPTER VII

Digression on Rocks, Soils and Men

1 IFE HAS GROWN froxii thc rock and still rests upon
it; because men have left it far bcliind, they are able
consciously to turn back to it. We do turn back, for
it has kept some hold over us. A liberal rationalist.
Professor G. M. Trevelyan, can write of ‘the brotherly love
that we feel ... for trees, flowers, even for grass, nay even
for rocks and water’ and of ‘our brother the rock’ ; thc stone
of Scone is still used in the coronation of our kings.

The Church, itself founded on the rock of Peter, for cen-
turies fought unsuccessfully against thc worship of ‘sticks
and stones’. Such pagan notions have left memories in thc
circles and monoliths that still jut tlirough thc heather on our
moorlands or stand naked above thc turf of our downs. I
believe that they linger, too, however faintly, in our
churchyards — for who, even at thc height of its popularity,
ever willingly used cast-iron for a tombstone?

It is true that these stones were never simply themselves,
but stood for dead men, were symbols of fertility, or, as at
Stonehenge, were primarily architectural forms. But for
worshippers the idea and its physical symbol are ambivalent;
peasants worship the Mother of God and the painted doll in
front of them; the peasants and herdsmen of prehistoric times
honoured thc Great Mother or the Sky God, thc local
divinities or thc spirits of their ancestors and also thc stones
associated with them. The Blue Stones of Stonehenge, for
example, were evidently laden with sanctity. It seems that
these slender monoliths were brought from Pembrokeshire

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DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

to Salisbury Plain because in Wales dicy had already
absorbed holiness from their use in some other sacred struc-
ture. There is no question here that the veneration must
have been in part for the stones themselves.

Up and down die country, whether they have been set up
by men, isolated by weathering, or by melting ice, con-
spicuous stones arc coimnonly identified with human beings.
Most of our Bronze Age circles and menhirs have been
thought by the country people living round them to be men
or women turned to stone. The names often help to express
this identification and its implied sense of kinship; Long Meg
and her Daughters, the Nine Maidens, the Bridestonc and
the Merry Maidens. It is right that they should most often be
seen as women, for somewhere in the mind of everyone is an
awareness of woman as earth, as rock, as matrix. In all these
legends human beings have seen themselves melting back
into rock, in their imaginations must have pictured the body,
linibs and hair melting into smoke and sohdifying into these
blocks of sandstone, limestone and granite.

Some feeling that represents the converse of this idea
arises from sculpture. I have never forgotten my oivn excite-
ment on seeing in a Greek exhibition an unfinished statue in
which the upper part of the body was perfect (though the
head still carried a m a ntle of chaos) while the lower part dis-
appeared into a rough block of stone. I felt that the limbs
were already in existence, that the sculptor had merely been
uncovering them, for his soundings were there — little
tunnels reaching towards the position of the legs, feeling for
them in the depths of the stone. The sculptor is in &ct doing
this, for the act of creation is in liis mind, from his niind the
form is projected into the heart of the stone, where then the
chisel must reach it.

lOI

A LAND

Rodin was one of the sculptors most conscious of these
emotions, and most ready to exploit them. He expressed
both aspects of the process — ^man merging back into the
rock, and man dctacliing himself from it by the power of
hfe and mind. He was perhaps incUned to sentimentalize the
relationship by dwelling on the softness of the flesh in
contrast with the rock’s harshness. This was an irrelevance
not dreamt of by the greatest exponent of the feeling —
Michelangelo. It is fitting that the creator of the mighty
figures of Night and Day should liimself have spent many
days in the marble quarries of Tuscany supervising the
removal of his material from the side of the mountain. So
conscious was he of the individual quahty of die marble and
of its influence on sculpture and architecture that he was
willing to endure a long struggle with the Pope and at last
to suffer heavy financial loss by maintaining the superiority
of Carrara over Servezza marble. Michelangelo was an
Itahan working widi Italian marble and Italian light; widi
us it has been unfortunate that since medieval tinies so many
of our sculptors have sought the prestige of foreign stones
rather than following the idiom of dieir native rock. It is
part of the wisdom of our greatest sculptor, Henry Moore,
to have returned to English stones and used them with a
subtle sensitiveness for their personal qualities. He may have
inherited something from his father who, as a miner spend-
ing his working life in the Carboniferous horizons of York-
shire, must have had a direct understanding not only of coal
but of the sandstones and shales in which it lies buried and on
which the life of the miner depends. Henry Moore has him-
self made studies of miners at work showing their bodies
very intimate with the rock yet charged with a life that
separates them from it. (Graham Sutherland in his studies of

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DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

tin mines became preoccupied with the hollow forms of the
tunnels and in them liis men appear ahnost embryonic.)

Henry Moore uses his understanding of the personality of
stones in his sculpture, allowing their individual qualities to
contribute to his conception. Indeed, he may for a moment
be regarded in the passive role of a sympathetic agent giving
expression to the stone, to the silting of ocean beds shown in
those fine bands that curve with the sculpture's curves, and
to the quality of die Hfe that shows itself in die delicate
markings made by shells, corals and sea-hhes.

It would certainly be inappropriate to his time if Moore
habitually used the Italian marbles so much in favour since
the Renaissance. For this fashion shows how man in his
greatest pride of conscious isolation wanted stone which was
no more than a beautiful material for his mastery. Now
when our minds are recalling the past and our own origins
deep within it, Moore reflects a greater humility in avoiding
the white silence of marble and allowing his stone to speak.
That is why he has often chosen a stone like Hornton, a rock
from die Lias that is full of fossils all of which make their
statement when exposed by liis chisel. Sometimes the stone
may be so assertive of its own qualities that he has to batde
with it, strive against the hardness of its shells and the soft-
ness of adjacent pockets to make them, not efface themselves,
but conform to liis idea, his sense of a force thrusting from
widiin, wliich must be expressed by taut lines without weak-
ness of surface.

Moore uses Hornton stone also because it has two colours,
a very pale brown and a green widi deeper tones in it. The
first serves him when he is conscious of liis subject as a light
one, the green when it must have darkness in it. Differences
in climate round the shores of the Liassic lakes probably

X03

A LAND

caused the change in colour of Hornton stone, and so past
chmates are reflected in the feeling of these sculptures. As
for the sculptor’s sense of hght or darkness inherent in his
subjects, it is my belief tliat it derives in large part from the
perpetual experience of day and night to which all conscious-
ness has been subject since its beginnings. The sense of light
and darkness seems to go to the depths of man’s mind, and
whether it is applied to morality, to aesthetics or to that
more general conception — the light of intellectual processes
in contrast with the darkness of the subconscious — ^its
symbolism surely draws from our constant swing below the
cone of night.

It is hardly possible to express in prose the extraordinary
awareness of the unity of past and present, of mind and
matter, of man and man’s origin which these thoughts bring
to me. Once when I was in Moore’s studio and saw one of
his reclining figures with the shaft of a belemnitc exposed in
the thigh, my vision of this unity was overwhelming. I felt
that the squid in which life had created that shape, even
while it still swam in distant seas was involved in tliis
encounter with the sculptor; that it lay hardening in the mud
until the time when consciousness was ready to find it out
and imagination to incorporate it in a new form. So a poet
will sometimes take fragments and echoes from other earher
poets to sink them in his own poems where they will enrich
the new work as these fossil outlines of former lives enrich
the sculptor’s work.

Rodin pursued the idea of conscious, spiritual man emerg-
ing from the rock; Moore sees him ratlier as always a part
of it. Through his visual similes he identifies women with
caverns, caverns with eye-sockets; shells, bones, cell plasm
drift into human form. Surely Mary Anning might have

104

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

found one of his forms in the Blue Lias of Lyme Regis?
That indeed would be fitting, for I have said that the Blue
Lias is like the smoke of memory, of the subconscious, and
Moore’s creations float in diose depths, where images melt
into one another, the direct source of poetry, and the distant
source of nourishment for the conscious intellect with its
clear and fixed forms. I can see his rounded shapes like
whales, his angular shapes like ichthyosaurs, surfacing for a
moment into that world of intellectual clarity, but plunging
down again to the sea bottom, the sea bottom where the
rocks arc silently forming.

Men know their affinity with rock and widi soil, but they
also use them, at first as simply as coral organisms use
calcium, or as caddis-worms use shell and pebbles, but soon
also consciously to express imagined ideas.

Building is one of the activities relating men most
directly to their land. Everyone who travels inside Britain
knows those sudden changes between region and region,
from areas where houses are built of brick or of timber
and daub and fields are hedged, to those where houses
are of stone and fields enclosed by drystone walling. Every-
where in the ancient moimtainous country of the west
and nordi stone is taken for granted; where the sudden
appearance of walls instead of hedges catches the eye is along
the belt of Jurassic Hmestones, often sharply delimited.
The change is most dramatic in Lincolnshire where the
limestone of Lincoln Edge is not more than a few miles wide
and the transformation from hedges to the geometrical
austerity of dry-walling, from the black and white, red and
buff of timber and brick to the melting greys of limestone
buildings, is extraordinarily abrupt.

The distinctive quaUties of the stones of each geological

105

A LAND

age and of each region powerfully affect the architecture
raised up from them; if those qualities precisely meet par-
ticular needs then, of course, the stones arc carried out of
their own region. Since the eighteenth century the value of
special qualities in building material has greatly outweighed
the labour of transport, and stones of many kinds have not
only been carried about Britain to places far from tliose
where they were originally formed, but have been sent
overseas to all parts of the world. Men, in fact, have
proved immensely more energetic than rivers or glaciers
in transporting and mixing the surface deposits of the
planet.

Now the process has gone too far; what was admirable
when it concerned only the transport of the finest materials
to build the greatest buildings has become damnable when
dictated by commercial expediency. The cheapness of
modem haulage has blurred the clear outlines of locality in
this as in all other ways; slate roofs appear among Norfolk
reed beds, red brick and tile in the heart of stone country,
while cities weigh down the land with huge masses of stone,
brick, iron, steel, and artificial marble dragged indiscrimin-
ately from far and near.

Nevertheless, there are still regional differences that will
hardly disappear. Britain would sink below the sea before a
Yorkshireman would buy Scottish granite to build his town
hall, or an Aberdonian outrage his granite city with a bank
of Millstone Grit. The danger is that Britain will not sink
below the sea, but simply into a new form of undifferen-
tiated chaos, when both Yorkshireman and Scot adopt
artificial stone and chromium hung on boxes of steel and
concrete.

While, on the one hand, it is admitted that even in the

io6

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

twentieth century regional differences still persist, it would,
on the otlier, be false to suggest that even when all transport
was by wind or muscle stone was not sometimes moved
about the country. If the Blue Stones of Stonehenge are die
most startling prehistoric instance, for the early Middle Ages
it is the importation of Caen stone. Very many cargoes of
this oohtic limestone were shipped from Normandy to
build our abbeys and cathedrals. Often it was ordered by the
great Norman clerics who, in a hostile land, found reassur-
ance in building with their native rock. The genes of the
Norman conquerors arc now mingled with those of most
of our royal and noble families, and through them also Caen
stone has been incorporated in our most sacred national
buildings — old St. Paul’s, Canterbury Cathedral, West-
minster Abbey.

It was of course most usually for ecclesiastical buildings
and for castles that stone was sliipped and carted about
Britain, particularly to those youthful parts of lowland
England south-east of die Jurassic belt. The material for
Ely Cathedral and other great East Anghan churches came
from Bamack in Nordiamptonshire, as did that for Barn-
well, Romscy and Thomey abbeys and many of the early
college buildings at Cambridge. The lower courses of King’s
chapel at Cambridge, the foundation stone laid by Henry
VI, came from the Permian Limestone of Yorkshire, while,
after the long interruption in building, the upper courses
were constructed of Jurassic stone from Northamptonshire,
the personal gift to the college of Henry VII. The fan vault-
ing of the roof, however, those exquisite artificial stalactites,
are again carved from a Permian deposit — the noted Roche
Abbey quarries in Yorkshire. So in one building the Permian
and Jurassic ages, the north and the Midlands have been

107

A LAND

made tributary to royal and scholastic pride, the service of
God and the imagination of man. I have brought in these
facts far from their proper place, to suggest a truth which is
perhaps too obvious to need such attention. That the centre
of gravity of a people in any age may be expected to be
found in the objects for which they will transport great
quantities of building material. Neohthic communities
hauled megalithic blocks to their communal tombs, Bronze
Age men did the same for their temples, the Iron Age Celts
amassed materials for their tribal strongholds, the Romans
for their xniHtary works and pubhe buildings; medieval
society sweated for its churches, colleges and castles. An
exceptionally abrupt transition is shown when in Tudor times
not only was much new material taken to build mansions
and palaces, but great quantities of stone were actually carried
away from rehgious buildings for these secular uses. With
the exception of the building and rebuilding of London
churches, until the end of the eighteenth century stone con-
tinued to be transported mainly to great town and country
houses or occasionally to public buildings. The Victorians
moved unprecedented masses of stone for town halls,
exchanges, museums, government offices, Houses of Par-
liament, as well as for factories and docks. In the twentieth
century material, no longer usually in its natural state, has
been concentrated on vast industrial offices, power stations,
luxury flats, central and local govenunent offices and once
again, diough with moderation, on schools and colleges.
We have also practised a wholesale adaptation of buildings
(mostly from private to public purposes) which seems to
indicate a lack of vitality.

What arc the qualities which have attracted men to the
different stones formed in such varied conditions— on ocean

108

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

floors, in salt lakes and lagoons, by the eruption of vol-
canoes?

Granite — it seems inevitable to begin with granite, even
though so many people have ended with it, lying under
those glossy pinkish slabs labelled in gold or black and some-
times crowned with a stony wreath. Tlie royal mausoleum
at Frogmore is built of Dartmoor granite, while inside it, the
thirty-ton sarcophagus in which the anxieties of the Prince
Consort were laid to rest is of granite too, but Scottish
granite, a genuine blue Peterhead from Aberdeen. The
Queen loved granite because she hated change; at her
express wish nineteen varieties representing the principal
Aberdeen granites were used to ornament the pulpit at
Balmoral. The mausoleum and sarcophagus at Frogmore
represent the two main sources of granite: Scotland and the
south-western peninsula. Detached blocks of granite have
been used in their own localities since the beginning of our
architecture — for mcgalitliic tombs, for standing stones and
sacred avenues, for early Christian crosses — but it was not
until the eighteenth century that it was quarried for any-
thing more than rough local purposes, and even then with
great difficulty. Some of the first from Cornwall was used
for the outside of Smeaton’s ill-fated Eddystone lighthouse,
then both Devon and Aberdeen granite went into Rennie’s
Waterloo Bridge (I seem to remember that on its demoli-
tion the balusters were sold as mementoes, and must now
be scattered up and down the country). With the Victorians,
and how appropriately, granite came into its own; the
substance of wild moorlands was transformed into kerb-
stones, railway bridges, into post offices, public fountains
and public houses, family fish-shops, and above all, into
banks.

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A LAND

Ironically, this rock, the pillar of Victorianism, a symbol
for endurance, can also remind us of insecurity and im-
permanence, coming as it does directly from the restless
quag beneath us, the molten sea on which our wafer floats.
For die basalts and other igneous rocks that are the products
of actual volcanic eruption little use has been found except
for road making. Visitors to the Lake District may know
that Keswick is largely built of the volcanic ash of Borrow-
dalc, the particles now held in the walls of its cottages and
flower gardens once having fallen in fiery cascades onto an
Ordovician sea.

For the mason there is an important distinction between
granite and other igneous rocks and the sedimentary
deposits of whatever age. Normally the layers of silt form-
ing the sedimentary rocks have given them a grain which
the mason must study almost as carefully as a carpenter
studies his wood. These layers, having been laid down
horizontally, must be kept horizontal in their human setting,
for in this position they can better throw off rainwater.
Rocks of so fine and close a grain that no layering is visible
are called freestones, for the mason is free to cut and set
them as he will. There are perfectionists, however, who
maintain diat even with freestones every block should be
marked in the quarry so that it may be kept in its natural
plane.

There is another characteristic of the sedimentary rocks of
very great significance for mason and builder. All newly cut
stone is permeated with ‘quarry water’ which holds various
minerals either dissolved or in suspension. On exposure the
quarry water is drawn gradually to the surface where it eva-
porates, depositing the minerals near the surface and so form-
ing a tough outer skin. It is therefore most desirable that

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

every block should first be cut into its final shape and then be
seasoned to allow it to go into the building with the skin
unbroken. In this way it is assured that mouldings, leaves,
noses and other excrescences have the best possible chance to
survive weathering. Christopher Wren, an artist properly
sensitive to his materials, would use no block in St. Paul’s
unless it had been exposed for at least three years.

The oldest pre-Cambrian and Cambrian rocks do not
usually make good building stone as they have been shat-
tered and faulted by the experience of hundreds of millions
of years. In Shropsliire the pre-Cambrian rocks of the
Longmynd plateau, dull red and green with lighter veining,
are now tipped so that the strata stand vertically on edge,
and are so minutely shattered that their surface looks like a
finely wrinkled skin. They are bad for building; there are
not even any dry-walls on the Longmynd moors, while the
farms and cottages round its foot are generally of brick or
timber. The neighbouring small town of Church Stretton,
however, has been given a curiously dark complexion by the
use of reddish and purple Ordovician rocks. These come
from the other side of its lush green valley where the proud
line of hills reacliing from Caer Caradoc to the Wrekin,
though buttressed and crenellated with pre-Cambrian vol-
canic rocks, also yields these warmly coloured sandstones
which are among the few Ordovician formations to have
been widely employed for building.

The one creation of these most remote ages that man has
seized upon with avidity are the North Welsh slates formed
from the fine dark muds that once lay on Cambrian sea
floors. This antique mud has been hardened by pressure,
faulted and cleaved until it readily splits into thin, impervious
sheets. They may be hard, mean and monotonous when

A LAND

compared with good clay or stone tiles, but tliey are effective,
a material well fitted to their own grey climate. Here in
London I look out from my top windows over a realm of
slate, every square of which has been carried across England
to this region of clays and gravels.

Slates will survive for a time overhead, but they have
already been displaced from one small but honourable ser-
vice. When she first took me to school, my mother hunted
out a slate, a little rectangle of Cambrian mud framed in
wood and with a morsel of sponge tied to one comer. With
it went a slim cylinder of the same stuff— a slate pencil. Even
my infant mind was certain that she was wrong, I seemed to
know that I belonged to a generation for which such simple
natural products were improper. It was as anomalous as a
horn book. Of course I proved to be right; I was full of
shame and horror for my slate — ^which is why I can still see
it so plainly — a survival from a passing age endangering my
first day at school.

Even the demand for roofing slates is, I suppose, already
dwindling. Not long ago, I climbed up a moimtain side in
North Wales and found an abandoned slate quarry half
hidden in a tributary valley. It must once have had a settle-
ment, a small community of quarrymen, for beside the
tremendous but now partly overgrown gulfs where hun-
dreds of tons of slate had been hacked from the mountain,
there was a row of ruined stone cottages with naked rafters
and floors buried under their fallen roofs. Opposite was the
big workshop where the slate had been split and cut. Mag-
nificent squared slabs of it, too heavy to hft, were still lean-
ing against the walls, and the whole floor, as well as the
space between the workshop and the cottages, was strewn
with many layers of discarded fragments, like heavy leaves.

rhiv w.is the tlav of reptile imperiali'

PIAThX AMMONITB

‘By now thf aninionitc's wru* assmning bizarre and deeadem forms’ (sec p. Si )

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

It was perfectly silent and melancholy. Moving sharply, I
startled a troup of homed sheep nibbling at the grass which
thrust up where it could between the stones. Like the horses
of some defeated army they wheeled away down the moun-
tain side, and I can still recall the brittle sound of their hoofs
on the waste of slates and the dwindling echoes of the small
fragments sent flying into the depths of the quarries. This
place, with its ribbing of bare rafters, was, I felt, the skeleton
of a superseded form of Ufe, a fossil standing in full dayUght.

The deposits laid down after the building of our highland
mountains, products of violent denudation, have no special
virtue ftir man. Yet the old Red Sandstone has been well
used locally and its desert heat colours many buildings in the
west Midlands — Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucester-
shire — and many parts of Scotland. Indeed, its use in
Scotland is of special interest, for it was in the Old Red
Sandstone pits on the shore of the Moray Firth that Hugh
Miller worked as a quarryman and first exposed the
Devonian fishes.

The abundance of fish in tlie Devonian seas is responsible
for the character of one of the most distinctive rocks of that
age, the Caithness Flagstones, which have been sent all over
the world for paving and for making stairs. In the middle of
the nineteenth century Sir Roderick Murchison wrote; ‘The
Flagstones of Caithness ... are in many places impregnated
with bitumen chiefly resulting from the vast quantities of
fishes embedded in them. The most durable and best quahdes,
as flagstones, are derived from an admixture of this bitumen
with finely laminated sUicious, calcareous and argilaceous
particles, the whole forming a natural cement more im-
pervious to moisture than any stone with which I am
acquainted.’ After which it seems a rchef to quote an Ed-
H 113

A LAND

Wardian source for the information that ‘Baron Liebig’s
great establishment on the River Plate, in South America,
for the manufacture of his well known meat extract, is
floored throughout with Caithness flags’.

Men had discovered the value of their inheritance from
the Age of Fishes long before the Age of Meat Barons.
Nearly four thousand years ago it was used to build the
cruciform megalithic tomb of Maeshowe in the Orkneys,
the finest monument of its kind in Britain. Here the habit
of the Flagstone of splitting into perfect rectangular blocks
has given the masonry of the burial chamber a neatness
and regularity imique for its time — and also perhaps rather
uninteresting. The place might almost be a concrete pill-box
or air-raid shelter. On the other hand it must have been these
smooth, well-jointed surfaces that tempted the Vikings who
were sheltering in the tomb on some day during the
twelfth century to take out their knives and engrave
the runic writing and the fantastic Norse beasts that,
thanks to the fish cement, have not changed from that
day to this.

Not far away from Maeshowe, an Early Bronze Age
community took Caithness Flagstone to build their village of
Skara Brae. They used it not only in small pieces for the dry-
stone walls of the houses and in large sheets for the doors and
doorways and for the paving and roof of the alleys, but also
for household furniture. This, by some thousands of years
the most antique furniture in Britain, includes dignified
dressers, well-proportioned pieces with two shelves and cup-
board room below.

It is only with the Mountain Limestone, the Millstone
Grit and the sandstones, limestones and shales of the Coal
Measures — all the rocks made by the silting up of the Car-

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

boniferous seas — that the activities of men become really
great. The building raised from these formations must repre-
sent the energy of several volcanic eruptions. More even than
granite the rocks of this period are associated with the Vic-
torian Age and seem to have some subtle harmony with it. It
can be said that this Haison was entirely one of propinquity,
that these rocks were so much worked during the nineteenth
century because they occur in the north where the Industrial
Revolution caused an unprecedented activity both in dig-
ging down into the land and in building on its surface; that,
indeed, the very quest for coal resulted directly in the quarry-
ing of the contemporary Carboniferous rocks. Yet there is
something more personal than this, something massive,
enduring, grim and a little coarse-grained about these stones
that seem to make them the ideal stuff for much Victorian
architecture; something, too, about their dark greys and
browns that recommends them for the Town Halls, Ex-
changes, banks and prisons of our northern towns where
their native sobriety is soon deepened by a mourning veil of
soot.

I hesitate to give too simple an explanation of sympathies
which in fact always nm in two directions; the Carboni-
ferous rocks may have been well adapted to the character of
the Victorian Age, but then the character of the Victorian
Age would not have been the same without the Carboni-
ferous rocks.

The older formations of the period are not so fuUy
involved in the activity of the Industrial Revolution. In
Wensleydale, for instance, the Mountain Limestone wnth all
its bmden of fossils is used for the walls dividing the rich
pastures of the valley. The contemporary sandstone is
quarried by the dalesmen for their farms and for the bams

II5

A LAND

which, because of their Scandinavian inheritance, they Hke
to scatter among their more distant fields.

Again a sandstone of this early formation was brought
down from Scotland for that elegantly romantic structure,
the high arched bridge of King’s College, Cambridge.
Another exalted connection is with the Dukes of Devon-
shire. Among the Umestones of the Derbyshire Peak district
there are some sufficiently crystallized by volcanic heat
to take a high polish and to qualify, a Httle dubiously per-
haps, for the name of marble. Some of these Derbyshire
marbles are found on die estates of the Duke of Devonshire
round Bakewell and so have been drawn into the magnetic
field of Chatswordi. They have provided pedestals for
Dukes to stand on, they have done much to enrich the
interior of die house itself and have even thrust a pillar into
the Ubrary. Their names are deUghtful, reminiscent of those
friund in that miniature realm where fine artificiaUty and
fantasy are still maintained by the most fastidious anglers, the
fly-fishermen. Derby Black and Derby Fossil, Rosewood,
Bird’s Eye and Duke’s Red. T. S. Eliot has said diat the past
is ‘altered by the present as much as the present is directed
by the past’. To me it seems that the whole Carboniferous
episode, the silting and sinking of Tethys, is changed and
enriched by the creation of these ornate trappings and these
lively names. I hope that some day a newly created noble-
man of originality (if there arc such) will choose to call him-
self not after a place ■with which he is con n ected but after
a period of time.

I must quote one last example of the use of early Carboni-
ferous stone because it shows rather deUghtfully how every
moment of time has its exact and irrecoverable savour.
Limestone from the Black Pasture quarries in Northumber-

li6

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

land was used by Roman engineers for a bridge across the
North Tyne tliat was one of the greatest triumphs of their
skill. Some of the piers, showing a curious feathered surface
tooling, still survive. Only in the Lower Carboniferous
could precisely that limestone have been formed; only the
Romans would have tooled and used it in just that way, and
certainly only someone who had had a nineteenth-century
upbringing could have written this account of the piers:
‘Two others are, when the waters are low and placid, to be
seen in the bed of the stream. Blocks of masonry, which have
resisted the roll of this impetuous river for more than seven-
teen centuries are a sight worth seeing, even at the expense of
being immersed in cold water to the full extent of the lower
extremities.’

With the Millstone Grit and Coal Measure rocks I come
at last to the formation that might have been laid down
expressly for the use of nineteenth-century architects. Mill-
stone Grit, whose harshness is sufficiently evoked by its
name, has made Euston Station, Bradford Waterworks,
Millwall Docks, the Town Hall at Newcastle, Board Schools
in Sheffield, and Birmingham and Leicester Gaols. Coal
Measure rocks provided the material for the Exchanges of
Manchester and Liverpool, and for the Town Halls of Man-
chester, Bradford and Leeds. Surely the weight of these
buildings is enough to enforce the argument.^

The dour grey and brown rocks of the Carboniferous Age
which are so apt an expression of the stubborn civic pride, the
puritanical distrust of elegance and hght of our northern
industrialists are followed by a return of the warm colours
that commemorate the Permian and Triassic Ages, the
renewed denudation of mountains in desert and heat. The
New Red Sandstone glows pleasantly in many local churches

II7

A LAND

and had its fling in the astonishing pile of the St. Pancras
Hotel. For this period it is the Magnesian Limestones diat
have had a national currency. Although they have given the
material for many successful buildings up and down the
country, they have also been responsible for one conspicuous,
notorious and expensive failure. This was in the very shrine
of our democratic institutions, the Houses of Parliament.
While Barry and Pugin wxrc not very happily seeking to
agree over the principles of Gothic design and the details of
Gothic ornament, a Royal Conmiission w^as responsible for
the choice of the stone in wdiicli their ideas wxre to be
embodied. After earnest weighing of evidence, during which
Portland stone most unfortunately was rejected, tlie Com-
mission reported tliat ‘for crystalline character, combined
with a close approach to the equivalent proportions cT car-
bonate of lime and carbonate of magiiesia; for uniformity
of structure, facility and economy in conversion, and for
advantage of colour, the Magnesian Limestone or Dolojiiite
of Bolsover Moor, and its neighbourhood, is, in our opinion,
the most fit and proper material U) be employed in the pro-
posed new Houses of Parliament’. But alas for semi-
scientific pomposity when it is not anchored to cither real
knowiedge or an intimate understanding of particular ficts.
Before the buildings had risen above the level of their base-
ments the Bolsover quarries were exhausted, and had in truth
never yielded blocks large enough to serve the ambitions of
Barry and Pugin. After further solemn and ill-informed dis-
cussion it was decided to transfer to the Anston Stone
Quarries, a few miles from Bolsover, but across the Derby-
shire boundary into Yorksliire. As a result of tlic profound
irresponsibility, the lack of contact with reality, characteris-
tic of the ‘sound’ civil servant, the ‘stone w^as quarried and

Ii8

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

delivered indiscriminately, without regard to the nature of
the bed, tlie lie of tlie rock in the quarry, or the necessary
seasoning of die stone’. A few decades of exposure to the
climate of London and particularly to its acid-charged rain,
and the whole of that vast display of Gothic revivalism began
to crumble and dissolve. All the heraldic and architectural
detail, the coats of arms, crowns, gargoyles, canopies and
finials, turned leprous, flaked and peeled, and, as dust or in
solution, found their way into the Thames and so back to the
sea. The nation has had to meet a heavy bill and is now con-
fronted with an unsightly, mottled fi^ade witli its pale
patches of Jurassic Clipsham among the darker Anston
stone. For more than ten years the Victoria tower has stood
above Westminster as a scaficilded ruin. There can hardly be
a more revealing example of the disaster that threatens remote
control, when men deal with practical matters on a diet of
words. These solemn Commissioners, and these civil servants,
w4\o doubtless liagglcd over sixpences with the most con-
scientious futility, had never touched, seen, studied or under-
stood the land they were attempting to use. That the cata-
strophe could have been avoided is proved by the old
Geoh^gical Museum. The stone for this building came at
mucli the same time from the identical source, but its quarry-
ing was supervised by Mary^ Anning’s old friend, de la
Beche, a man who knew his rocks both scientifically and
humanly. Hardly a block has decayed.

The deposits formed by the hot and brackish Keuper
lakes, although they have been well used in their own
regions, most notably in Hereford Cathedral, have not
generally been more widely sought. There is, however, one
among them endowed with qualities which caused it to be
transported not only about Britain but throughout Western

A LAND

Europe. The alabaster or gypsum laid down by the Kcuper
lakes in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire has the indi-
viduality, the high differentiation that always and in all
thuigs makes a nucleus ofpower. It was easy to carve and tlic
soft white of the sulphate of lime, sometimes tinged with a
pale golden brovm, was given both delicacy and depth by
its translucence. During the Middle Ages these virtues
attracted round it a thriving school of sculpture. It was used
not only for the effigies on vast numbers of tombs, for
chantries and reredos (the one in St. George’s Chapel,
Windsor, took ten cartloads) but also for small pieces —
crucifixes, tabernacles, pictas, popular in this country and
wddely on the Continent. Indeed, the Englishman travel-
ling in Germany, the Low Countries, in France, or in
Spain and Portugal, is more likely to come upon these
pieces cut from his own hills than he is in the land from
which tliey came. They arc not w^orks of art, but good
artificers’ products with a piety and feeling preserved in
traditional forms. Sometimes the lily was gilded, the glow-
ing translucciicy of tlie stone completely masked behind
skins of red, blue, green and gold itself. Did this mean that
the carvers appreciated alabaster only as a material easily
cut, delightful to smooth, or did they feel that these
tinctures laid upon it gave their creations a double virtue,
remaining always conscious of tlic inner light of the
alabaster — that must indeed have given the colours an added
brilliance.^

The beds of Keuper alabaster are so narrowly limited that
I seem to see it throughout geological time with the prelates
ill their copes and mitres, the wasp-waisted noblemen and
knights with lions at their feet and kirtled ladies with their
little dogs, together with the forms of Christian icono-

\20

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

graphy already lying within ; negative fossils, shapes waiting
for creation instead of surviving from it.

Another stone of high individuality, formed just as tlie
Keuper lakes were giving way to the Liassic sea, was to
appeal to the inconstant eye of man long after the attrac-
tion of alabaster had been forgotten. Gotham Marble from
near Bristol had a strong appeal to interior decorators of the
nineteenth century who employed it to add to the heavy
elaboration of fireplaces and overmantels. Gases seeping
tlirough Keuper mud have given Gotham Marble the
curious markings that look like avenues of trees in heavy
summer foliage. 1 remember that in our family museum
(rather incongruously situated in the maids’ bathroom)
there was a small slab of polished Gotham bearing one of
these natural landscapes. 1 suspect that it came from some
dismantled fireplace, a particle in the redeposition of this
oniate stone that took place as changing tastes threw Vic-
torian fashions on the scrap heap.

In forming the oolitic limestones, the wide sea of the
Jurassic Age made the greatest and fairest contribution to the
buildings which in time were to be raised in Britain. For the
last two thousand years, since masoned stone was introduced
hy the Roman conquerors, the rocks of the Jurassic belt have
been used for buildings of every kind, culminating in many
of our finest mansions, colleges, churches and catliedrals. It
was the most easterly deposit of any great extent old enough
to make a hard building stone. For this reason it was not only
quarried by its own population but was also sought by the
increasing millions who lived on the younger formations to
the east of it, people who had no native buildmg stone equal
to expressing their imagination, wealth and ambition.
Through centuries, carts, barges, ships, railway trucks and

I2T

A LAND

lorries have gone to the Jurassic belt and carried a way heavy
cargoes to embody the architectural aspirations of the low-
land English. The architect who held shaped in his mind a
pier cluster, a sprocketed finial or a west front, a pediment,
acanthus leaf or colonnade, whatever was appropriate to his
moment of time, would seek to give it substance in these
limestones with their great range of colours and textures.

The oldest of the Jurassic deposits, the soft and crumbly
Lias, had little value until our synthetic age when it has
come into its own for the making of lime and cement. But
from Somerset to Yorkshire the overlying oolites have been
so much quarried that many of the best varieties are now
exhausted. In the extreme south-west the Doulting quarries
gave the material for Wells Cathedral and for Glastonbury,
but Gloucestershire is the region where these limestones have
done most to create an entire countryside. Men and sheep
and the limestone hills have together made the Cots wold
realm, with its small unchanging towns and church-proud
villages, its hamlets and country houses, surely one of the
most lovely stretches of rural urbanity in the world. All
buildings from the low gabled cottages to the huge Perpen-
dicular churches are walled, and should be roofed, with the
stone on which they rest. All reflect its faint golden light,
though the dry-stone walls seem to assume a greyer tone
in contrast with the ruddy browns and russet of the Cots-
wold soil.

I have said ‘ should be roofed’ because some buildings have
now lost the stone tiles that are their proper covering. There
are several places in the Cotswolds where the special lime-
stones necessary for these tiles can be quarried, but perhaps
none is so well known as the Stonesficld pits near Oxford.
There the tile beds were very thin and had to be pursued by

122

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

means of shafts and horizontal tunnels. Tliis work was done
between Michaelmas and Christmas, but once the pendle, as
it was called, had been quarried, it had to be put in clamps
until the first sharp frost. Extraordinary as it may seem,
it could not be artificially split and the whole industry
depended entirely on the help of frost. When it did come,
and it was hoped for in January, every man in the village
rallied to spread out the slabs of pendle; if it fell suddenly
during the night the church bells were rung to summon the
villagers. They must often have hurried up the street while
the bell was still ringing through the frosty air; dien, dark
figures in the moonlight, they attacked the clamps and
strewed the big slabs on the stiffening grass. If the frost had
done its work, the men gave the summer to shaping and
piercing the thin sheets, each sitting in a little shelter of
hurdles or waste stone. If the frost failed then the industry
was at a standstill and the pendle had to be buried deeply in
cool soil, for if once the ‘quarry water’ was allowed to escape
the slabs became ‘bound’ and could never be split.

The Stoncsficld beds are full of fossils from a warm shal-
low Jurassic sea: corals mingled with the spines and shells of
sea urchins, molluscs, sea reptiles and turtles. They also yield
a few land creatures — even, though very rarely, the teeth
and jaws of early mammals. Like Mr. Aiming of Lyme, the
Stonesfield workers knew the value of these fossils and dis-
played them for sale in their cottage windows where they
might be seen by learned men from Oxford.

The demand for Stonesfield tiles is still so great that the
roofs of cottages and bams have been stripped to sell them
for cash ; the present villagers, too, recall how much the old
men loved their work, knowing the characters of their pits
as intimately as those of their wives. Yet now the pits and

123

A LAND

spoil heaps arc overgrown and it is many years since the
tapping of pick and hammer was heard during the summer,
or the village was roused on a frosty night by the sound of
bells. The industry has died partly because the money was
bad, and partly, so it is said, because in tliis century the
winters have too often been mild. The last tile worker,
Thomas Griffin, died recently as a very old man.

I have given the history of Stonesfield in some detail
because it shows so well an intimate relationship between
men and stone. By contrast the history of Oxford stone
is an unhappy one. Oxford would seem to be far more
foitunate than Cambridge in being situated on the Jurassic
belt where learning and piety could be worthily housed
without sending bullock wagon or horse and cart over
fifty miles to fetch the necessary material. Good oolitic lime-
stone could be quarried close at hand. But so also could bad;
the facility was too great.

Unlike the Cotswold villages that were built in ashlar, the
old villages in the neighbourhood of Oxford were in rough
rubble masonry, often of a ragstone yielded by coral reefs.
Lumpy and difficult to shape, it was immensely durable. The
builders of early medieval Oxford used tliis same method
and the same Coral Rag and in many of the oldest buildings
— St. Michael’s tower and the tower of the Castle, in the
City Wall — their rubble jnasonry survives almost un-
weathered. Even when in the later Middle Ages squared
stone masonry was wanted for more ambitious building, the
material was supplied by men who knew^ their local quarries
as well as the villagers of Stonesfield knew theirs. Much of the
best came from Taynton, near Burford, where ‘for a
thousand years the quarrymen came each morning up the
white road from die village and made the valley ring with

124

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

their hammers and axes*. But large quantities were also
brought from close at hand, from Headington Hill where
to-day the cottages appear to be tossed about on a rough sea
as they cling to the irregular humps and hollows of the old
quarries. There were two kinds of stone at Headington, a
‘hardstone’ that was a reef formation, and a ‘freestone* that
had been laid down in the channels running between the
reefs. In medieval times the hardstonc was used for plintlis
and walling while the freestone needed for quoins, jambs,
sills, lintels and the other dressings came from Taynton.
With the seventeenth century, however, when the imagina-
tion of architects had been captured by classical ideals, there
began an insatiable demand for freestone to build facades
which were largely dependent on the clean surface texture of
good ashlar masonry. It was now that the intimacy between
builders, quarrymen and stone broke down. Freestone began
to be taken from Headington in great bulk and without the
loving selection that went with the old understanding of the
vices and virtues of every pit. Tlic haste with which college
buildings were going up during the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries, and perhaps a growing estrangement
between the providers and the users of the stone, meant that
it was often used unseasoned and wrongly bedded. One can
perhaps see in it all a symptom of the intellectual arrogance
of the Renaissance, of its proud isolation of the hiunan
intellect both from its own imconscious roots and from its
natural surroundings. Certainly such arrogance has not often
been more quickly exposed. Within a few decades the poor
quality freestones began to blister, flake and fall away. The
smooth ashlar of the classical facades seemed to be trying to
assume a romantic lack of definition; the lines of pediments
and architraves were blurred, the detail of acantlius and

125

A LAND

volute rotted; whole buildings fell into a premature and
degraded old age. Although by the end of the eighteenth
century the fiilurc was understood and the use of Heading-
ton freestone abandoned, college chests arc still being drained
to pay foi restorations. At their best these have a too mech-
anical perfection, at their worst they show a wretched patch-
work of colours and textures which can never regain the
even shading, the bloom, of stones coming from one source
and growing old together. In writing in this way I reveal no
more than the feeling of this twentieth-century moment. A
hundred years ago late followers of romantic taste felt quite
otherwise. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: ‘How ancient is
the aspect of these college quadrangles ! so gnawed by time
as they arc, so crumbly, so blackened, and so grey where
they are not black . . . The effect of this decay is very pic-
turesque, and is especially striking, I think, on edifices of
classical architecture, such as some of the colleges are, greatly
enriching the Grecian columns, which look so cold when the
outlines arc hard and distinct.’

Cambridge was without the temptation of cheap stone
quarries dose at hand, and without temptation it was easy to
be discreet. The medieval builders turned to the Jurassic belt
and particularly to Bamack in Nortliamptonshirc, famous
for its stone at least since the seventh century when it was
used by King Wulfere for Peterborough Cathedral. Bar-
nack church itself is Saxon and after a thousand years its
balusters and long and short work are still fresh. Many
medieval college buildings were of this Barnack freestone,
and even after the fifteenth century, when the quarries were
at last exhausted, more of die stone reached Cambridge
indirectly when the fcnland abbeys of Romsey and Thomey,
as well as Barnwell, were pillaged to build Corpus Christi

126

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

and King’s. Noble ruins are allowed to stand only where
virgin stone is plentiful; in the south-eastern counties men
swarmed round them like ants carrying away the stone to
express their own ideals. Blocks shaped to express Gothic fan-
tasy must often have been made to serve classical restraint.

When the Barnack pits had been worked out, nearly
related limestones were brought from Rutland and Lin-
colnshire, all equally well chosen. Among them Ketton
stone is perhaps the loveliest — die creamy stone clouded with
pink that contributes to the grace of Trinity College
library and adjacent Neville’s Court. All these stones coming
from the northern extension of the Jurassic belt between
Northamptonshire and Lincoln arc of fine quality when
compared with the treacherous Oxford oolites, and so it is
that Cambridge has never experienced the picturesque
dilapidation of nineteenth-century Oxford.

Both universities and all lowland England are brought
together in the pride of the Bath and Portland stones. It is
these that may be allowed to make a link between the
Jurassic Age and the eighteenth century comparable to that
which relates the nineteenth with Carboniferous times. The
simplicity characteristic of our native architects could hardly
have achieved its occasional nobility, its ahnost invariable
distinction widiout the Badi and Portland quarries. These
stones, with the slight bloom given by their oolitic struc-
tures and with their soft white or faintly buff colouring
shading so subtly on exposure, even to grimy atmospheres,
have added greatly to the quality of our finest buildings.

Bath stone has a cream colouring when first brought up
from die deep pits in which it is mined, but whitens on
exposure. Already it was being used by the Roman archi-
tects of Bath and for many Saxon buildings, including

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K LAND

the church raised by St. Aldlielni of Malmesbury still
standing at Bradford-on-Avon. It is told of this saint how
when one day he was riding near Box he ‘ threwe downe his
glove and bade them dig, and they should find great
treasure, meaning die quarry*. To-day this story has been so
far accepted by die trade that stone coming from diat site
is listed as St. Adliclm Box. The discovery has indeed proved
to be a great treasure to the nation.

Portland alone surpasses Badi stone as a medium in which
Renaissance architecture could achieve perfection. It is the
paler of the two with more grey and less yellow in its tone.
The Isle of Portland is ancient Crown property and when
Inigo Jones was chief architect and Surveyor-General to
James I he was charged as a part of his routine duties to make
a survey of the island. So he was led to an intimate know-
ledge of the oolite of Portland, and intimacy resulted (as it
occasionally does) in deep admiration. He himself used it for
the Great Banqueting Hall in Whitehall and its reputation
was established. Some doggerel verses were composed at the
time by one Farley who claimed a great famiharity widi
Portland stones and to know ‘as much of their mindes as any
man*.

Ere since the Architect of Heaven s fair frame
Did make the World and man to use the same;
In Eartlis wide womb as in our natural bed.
We have been hid, conceard and covered . . .
We were discovered and to London sent
And by good Artistes tried incontinent;

Who {finding us in all things firm and sound
Fairer and greater than elsewhere are found;
Fitter for carriage and more sure for weather
Than Oxford, Ancaster or Becr-^stonc eyther)
Did well approve our worth above them all
Unto the King for service at WhitehalL

128

IMATF \1

roSSII

The h.lir-likc himrs of the iretaieoiis herriir^ provoke aesthetic pleasure . . (see p. Si)

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOIES AND MEN

It was inevitable for Jones's successor in office. Sir Christo-
pher Wren, to succeed him also as patron of the Portland
quarries.

The Fire of London opened the way for Portland stone
and transformed the Isle into a vast stone-mason’s yard, with
its own cottages and wharves. Boatload after boatload of
huge blocks were brought along the south coast and up
the Thames to rebuild the gutted capital. After its long
passivity, after one hiuidred and fifty million years un-
touched by consciousness, this stone was now to spring up
in the rich variety of Wren’s towers and steeples, so urbane
and yet so fired with the idiosyncrasy of his genius, gleaming
like lilies among the rose-red brick of Caneletto’s paintings,
and now^ tottering but still gracious in our pliilistine and
ruined city. As its greatest glory, the stone was to grow, to
blossom, into St. Paufs, that incomparable building which
has endured all our latter-day barbarities.

As fortune in all things favours a woman in love until it
seems that she can do nothing wrong, a nation and country
in a certain state of vitality and entliusiasm will be con-
sistently fortunate. Seventeenth-century England still held
some of this vitality. Although Puritanism had already sown
its seeds of materialism andjoylcssness, the plants had not yet
grown large. The intellectual fire and clc'u light of the
Renaissance was burning among a people who still had some
of the poetic insights of the Middle Ages, and some of their
earthincss. It was one of the happy chances of a fortunate age
that the nation, as personified in its king, should have at its
command both an architect of genius and a material fitted
to give that genius its finest expression. As a final stroke of
good fortune die Great Fire came to give it room.

There is of course the cruel reverse of this state. Again like
1 129

A LAND

a woman, when a country is out of love with itself the whole
of life conspires against it. So at the present time if we have
architects of genius we also have means for preventing them
from being used; we are addicted to concrete and artificial
stone, and in the office of the Minister of Works, instead of a
Wren succeeding an Inigo Jones, an individual who can
build only mud pies is likely to be succeeded by one who has
no accomplishments.

The seventeenth century did not waste tlic chances
offered to it. At the king’s command the quarries in the Isle
of Portland were put under Wren’s control to be exclusively
used for the rebuilding of St. Paul’s. With an artist’s under-
standing of his material. Wren scrupulously supervised tlie
selection, cutting and seasoning of the stone. All went well:
the quarries wau'c not exhausted. Wren did not die and
money was not withheld. A considerable part of the Isle of
Portland, milliards of oolites which had once rolled softly on
the sea floor, were raised by king, people and architect into
our one great Renaissance cathedral. Tliat building ow’-cs
much of its quality to the subtle shading of the Portland
stone as it passes from the rain and wind-bleached points of
exposure to the sooty darkness of its most sheltered coigns
and hollows.

From the British Museum to the Cambridge Senate
House, the substance of many of our best known or finest
classical buildings has come from the distant Dorset quarries
that have contributed more than any others to the person-
ality of our architecture.

After this climax in the latest formations of the Jurassic
Age, the decline in good building stone is rapid. In the whole
of lowland England south and cast of the limestone belt,
that region which was formed from Cretaceous times on-

130

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

wards, there is very little with the necessary liardncss. Some
of the older Cretaceous formations, however, and especially
those exposed in the Weald, arc of some merit. I sliall single
out Kentish Rag, for this stone, though it is too intractable
to be good f<'>r anything but rubble masonry, is immensely
tough and lias been used in the south-east and in London at
least since Roman times. An original foundation of this Rag
supported the four Gotlhc catlicdrals tliat succeeded one
another on the site of St. Paul’s before the Great Fire.

Carstone I will mention in order to abuse it. This harsh,
ginger-coloured stone is quarried in Norfolk, especially near
the Royal Estates ot Sandringham and ‘ can be seen in many
of the picturesque buildings erected there’. Cut into tiny
bricks, it is used for the royal station of Wolferton, and as a
child on my way to Hunstanton, I used always to run to the
window of the carriage to see this model building, so like a
German toy, that seemed to go well with the bearing of
crowns and sceptres. So it did, but Carstone, wEcn, not only
at Sandringliam, but in many simple Norfolk cottages, it is
combined with bright red brick, provides the only example
known to me of a natural association, a vernacular style, that
is strident and unpleasing. Doubtless Mr. Kenneth Rowntree
could make one of his charming neat pictures of it, but I,
who love Norfolk as much as any county, hate this ginger
and red whether it appears in a seaside boarding-house or in
what would otherwise be a pleasant cottage.

The prime creation of later Cretaceous times, the chalk
that has so dominant a place in the natural architecture of
England, is among the humblest of building materials —
indeed men no longer trouble to use it. But while it remained
inevitable to build from the materials close at hand, the
people who lived on the chalk had an understanding of it

131

A LAND

which enabled them to use it efFectivcly for farms and bams
and even for their parish cliurches. Fortunately in some
regions, and particularly on Salisbur)^ Plain and the Wes-
sex downlands in the heart of the chalk country, a stone
occurs in natural association with the chalk that also com-
bines admirably with it in building. These are the sarsens
which now lie on the surface of the downs, the hardest frag-
ments surviving from a layer which once covered die chalk
but which has been worn away. These sarsen stones owe their
name to something strange in their appearance; the country
people called them Saracens because they felt that these
harsh, angidar blocks were alien to the yielding curves of the
chalk on which they lay. A seven teen di-century soldier
antiquary wrote of one Wessex village that it was ‘a place
so full of grey pibble stones of great bignes as is not usually
secne; they break them and build their houses of diem and
walls, laying mosse betux'cne, the inhabitants call them
Saracens stones, and in this parish, a mile and a halfe in
length, they lie so thick as you may go upon them all the
way. They call that place the Grey-weathers, because afar off'
they looke like a flock of sheepe.’

In their own right the sarsens have a most honourable
place in these memoirs. Because dicy liad already been
quarried by water, frost and wind they provided the best
possible material for masons with a rough equipment of
stone mauls and antler wedges. It was only because the blocks
were there that the religious architects of the Bronze Age
were able to build Avebury and Stonehenge on such a mag-
nificent scale. With their rough tools and tackle they were
capable of shaping the blocks, of moving and raising them,
in itself an astonishing feat, but they could hardly have
detached them from s(.»lid rock. If it was true to say that the

132

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

Victorian Age would not have been the same without the
Carboniferous rocks, it is a much simpler and more obvious
truth that without our sarsens wc should be deprived of our
two most heroic memories of the Bronze Age. Stonehenge
is a fascinating example of the effects, for good or ill, wliich
the mental influence of a people can have on the physical
inheritance of their land. If its incorporation in a great
work of art — book, poem or painting— can immensely
heigliten the quality and significance of some natural or
artificial feature so also it can be debased by man. Cafes
and chewing gum, car parks and conducted excursions, a
sense of the hackneyed induced by post cards, calendars and
cheap guide books has done more to damage Stonehenge
than the plundering of some of its stones. It will never again
be possible to sec it as Constable did when he made his
studies, a place of mystery against a background of storms
and flying showers; it is doubtful if it could ever again
have the deep impact on any man that it once liad on
Wordsworth; it seems no longer a setting fit for one of
Hardy’s gigantic, stereoscopic scenes. Men made it and men
have destroyed it, tlie whole action taking place in the
realm of die imagination.

Tlie grey wethers have led me away from the Ciialk. If
sarsen had it' spectacular triiuiiphs in megalitliic architecture,
it has far more commonly served humbler purposes. Chalk
(except for a few special varieties) cannot be successfully
used in building unless it is stuciicd and coddled, its weak-
nesses understood and guarded against. The greatest of these
weaknesses is an inability to resist water, and for this reason
it must be protected by wide eaves, by careful siting against
prevailing damp-laden winds, and by foundation courses to
keep it clear of the ground. In many Wessex farms the walls

133

A LAND

of chalk rubble or of squared chalk blocks rest on a footing
of sarsen stone which serves as an effective damp course.
Now, however, the local builders have forgotten how to
select or handle chalk or Ixnv to work sarsen. That ver-
nacular is dead and cannot be revived.

Among the varieties of chalk whose special qualities have
fwoured their use outside their own localities, one is the
Devonshire Beer Stone of Farley’s rhyme. But it is for me to
celebrate Cambridgeshire chinch, for it was in bicycling that
countryside to visit its parish churches that my earliest ideas
of architectural style and surfice texture were formed. In
itself the \\X)rd cluncli seems to me to slunv genius; could any
other better convey die soft yet dense and resistant quality of
chalk.^ Chinch, usually quarried either at Haslingfield or in
the Gogmagog Hills near Cherryhinton, was employed in
several of the oldest university buildings at Cambridge, but
almost all of it has now disappeared, having been cither
replaced or completely clcxikcd by brick or other more
durable coverings. Its pale, gently mouldering texture can,
however, still be seen in a wall of Pcterhouse Old Court
where it adjoins Little St. Mary’s churchyard. At Christ’s an
unsuccessful experiment was made to band it in alternate
courses with red brick. Within nvo hundred years it ‘pre-
sented so ruinous an appearance that persons were deterred
from entering students therein’. Perhaps Nathaniel Haw-
thorne would have proved an exception, but it had been
replaced with a freestone a ccntui'y before his day.

Chinch, hardly fit for permanent ashlar building, is a good
ingredient for liomcly country churches. With my inward
eye 1 can see those Cambridgeshire churches visited so
laboriously and with such intense enjoyment in my child-
hood, churches whose clunch rubble walls were patched

134

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

with brick, with harder stones, with inky flints. They were
walls which though they could never possess formal grace,
were part of a Gothic which had relapsed from poetry to a
pleasant domesticity, owing less to architectuic than to the
passage of time. Such obscure churches, their chancel walls
bulging, their porches leaning and towers sunken, the
creation of decay and repair rather than of deliberate inten-
tion, perfectly represent the slow persistence of village life.

If chalk is too soft and porous for good building, it carries
in it one of the hardest and least permeable materials in the
world — the flints compacted of sponges that once stood
delicate but rigid in the brilliant underwater world of
Cretaceous times. They have been used, worked and un-
worked, in every kind of building from pigsties to cathedrals.

Near the East Anglian coast rounded beach pebbles of
flint are set in mortar to produce a curiously stippled texture
unique in building. It is at its most distinctive in the round
church towers of Norfolk, plain almost featureless cvlinders,
massive and indeed Jiiilitary in purpose, yet given a sugary
appearance by this pale stipjding. In houses the cobbled
walls often have quoins and door and wnndow frames of
red brick, the combination producing a stiff and toy-like
air whicli, however, has none ot the ugliness ot brick
wnth Carstone. Sometimes more elaborate patterns are
drawai in brick on the cobble. The end of a barn at Huns-
w^orth in Norfolk carries a brick design, boldly executed and
w^cll spaced to repeat the outline of the gable, and composed
of eleven hearts, the initials E, R and B, and the date 1700.
The initials arc those of Edmund and Rebecca BridflTe, a
couple who had been married for many years when they
built the barn, Rebecca having already borne three daughters
and buried two of them. The work of those who build for

135

A LAND

their own use must always involve a land of love, but 1 like
to think that Edmund and Rebecca had more love than is
usual and that it was this which enabled them to leave a
stronger, more personal mark on their countryside than all
the otlicr generations of forgotten Britiffes wlio lived at
Hunswortli before and after tliem. I ha ve written of cobbles
in walls, when it is, of course, better known as a surface
covering for roads, pavements and yards. Often the finest
WT)rk ot this kind is associated witli a legend that every stcnie
had to be small enough to go into the workman’s mouth. I
was first told this story in connection with the famous cobbles
of Trinity Great Court and I can still faintly rc-cxpcriencc
the disagreeable sensation of choking and heaving that I
sufTered as I formed an imaginary picture of men forced to
carrv out this test on cverv one of the stones that WTre so
uncomfortable to mv small feet.

This is an art which is not yet dead and which may be
exercised in unexpected places. When I last crossed to the
island bird sanctuary ot Scolt I lead, I found that the guard-
ian, Chesney, had recently laid a cobble platform in front ot
the w^atchcr’s hut. He had made a concrete raft in the shifting
sand of the dunes, then, using cobbles of diHerent colours,
had made a bold design to frame the star, marked with the
points of the compass, that formed his centre-piece. Ches-
ney, a Brancastcr man, has a large quiet body and a mag-
nificent head set with a foimal pattern of curls, now^ white.
He, more than any man I have knowm, seems to draw
strength and repose from his countryside, that coast of tidal
creeks, wide salt marshes and dunes. His life is adapted to the
rhythm of the birds, their coming, mating, nesting and
departure. When he dies, I should like to sec a miracle. An
artist, a true primitive, should paint a picture showing his

136

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

body turned to a monolith and set up for ever on the
marshes, while his soul, a structure fine and clear as glass, is
earned up to the blue Norfolk heavens by a flock of his
tenis, their exquisite wdiitc, angled wings playing like light-
ning about it.

In formal buildings flint must be squared, or even skil-
fully knapped to fit into stone tracery as a kind of architec-
tural cloisonne. Some of the finest of tliis work is found in
Norwich and in the old Suffolk wool towns of Lavenham
and Long Mclfcu’d which, like their counterparts in tlie
Cotswolds, seem to stand as a petrified landscape surviving
from the later Middle Age. In those ornate Perpendicular
porches, encrusted with canopied niches, arcaded, crested
with scores of crockctcd finials the flint lias returned to a
state reminiscent of the life which it once knew when it grew
in brittle elegance on the sea bed.

The clays, sands and gravels deposited since the Chalk arc
generally useless for building unless worked upon by man.
But of course they always have been worked upon, for
nothing is simpler to handle or more tractable. In the days
when human dwellings were hardly to be distinguished from
the shelters of birds and animals, mud was daubed on to a
framework of brandies or wickcrwairk. Then it began to be
beaten into substantial walls of cob, or, supported on a kind
of hurdling, between the beams iTa timber frame. If the
thatch is well tended and the walls white or colour-washed,
there is no reason why these cob cottages should fall down —
and they do not, but have survived for centuries in all those
drow'sy villages throughout lowland England where native
mud is the accepted stuff for building. They have been
almost destroyed by chocolate boxes, birthday cards and
calendars, yet, perhaps because they are common enough to

337

A LAND

remain ordinary, they have survived the attack more suc-
cessfully than Stonehenge and other show places have done.
Certainly it is still possible to experience a fresh, unsenti-
mental cnjoyinent of these deep-thatched cottages that look
so secure and so utterly native — as though they were mush-
rooms thrusting tlirough the soil. Once, I remember, I
wxnt with my parents to the village of Abington outside
Cambridge; I believe I must have ridden pillion on my
mother’s bicycle, for I know^ that w^ien this incident hap-
pened I was running beside the bicycles up the village street.
We w ere a family extraordinarily reserved among ourselves,
as silent as trees in our emotional lives, and that may
be the reason w'liy I remember the occasion so very
clearly. I W'as greatly delighted by Abington, a typical
Cambridgeshire village of wliitewashed cob and thatch, the
cottages leaning comfortably against one anotlier, or stand-
ing apart in small gardens, and I was rinuiing along in a
kind of cnchantJiient. My father, who hated bicycling, and
always rode, it he could be induced t(^ mount at all, in a
painfully stiff and angular manner, suddenly looked dow n at
me and said, ‘My dear, Innv brigJit your eyes arc. They
really arc dancing.’ The words struck like an arrow and
suddenly I was tremendously conscious of myself, a small
bright-eyed girl enjoying the sight of cottages. I sincerely
believe this to have been my first moment of self-con-
sciousness.

The Romans made brick and tile in Britain but it is sur-
prising how^ long it was before men again began to fire our
native clays. When flint and the various forms of rammed
mud were so effective, there seemed no need for anything
better. Bricks wxre first established in eastern England where
they began to be manufactured in the thirteenth century

138

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

and were fairly plentiful by the fourteenth. In most of
Britain they were not commonly used until Tudor times,
but, once adopted, they were soon being piled into huge and
extravagant forms in the expanding towns and the sprawl-
ing iiiansions of tlie merchants and new nobility. Indeed,
they were liardly again to have so riotous a growth as tliat
of the carved and writhen Tudor chimney stacks. At first, as
everyone knows, English bricks were small, with the slight
inimitable irregularities of things made by hand, and usually
so much oxidized in firing as to be cither a dccji red or a
softer r('>sc colour. They were made locally, small pits being
worked wherever there was a suitable clay, even if it were
no more than a small pocket left in a hollow of the chalk
downs.

When tlie mass production of bricks began they became
lifelessly stereotyped, and were fired in kilns which often
left them pale, sometimes a horrible putty yellow. Now their
manufacture is largely concentrated in the castem Midlands,
most strongly in the Peterborough and Bedford regions
where the chiinne)^s make a naked forest and the air is
always unpleasant with the smell that rises from innumerable
kilns.

If bricks were the first building material used by man that
he himself liad made and not merely cut or dug from the
surface of the land, so long as they were hand-made they
retained a local quality, were influenced in colour and tex-
ture by the clays from which they were shaped. I remember
once when driving between the Hamblcdon Mills and York
being disturbed by some unusual quality in the villages and
small towns through which we passed, something I can only
describe as ominous. On making myself look for the cause, I
realized that the atmosphere was caused by nothing more

139

A LAND

than the prevailing colour, and that the colouring was made
by bricks exceptionally brown in shade and dark in tone
— due, no doubt, to some peculiarity of the glacial clays
in the Vale of York. For this reason I have allowed bricks
a small place in my narrative, but cement has none. After
many centuries of lime mortar, now remembered by
the picturesque ruins of lime kilns scattered tlnough the
countryside, die fatal discovery of Portland cement was
made about a century ago. I am aware diat steel and con-
crete building can be good, that it puts all kinds of possi-
bilities before us — such as houses wider at the top than at the
bottom or growing on a single stalk. But it is an architecture
alien to my dienie, for it represents tliat terrifying new
plienonienon, man mecliaiiizcd and living cut oft from liis
land, from the rock out of which lie lias come.

It is ijnpossiblc altogether to separate an account of our
rocks from the soils that overlie them. Sometimes soils are
formed directly from disintegrated stone, as in the ruddy
ploughland in the Red Sandstone territory of the west Mid-
lands, and more vividly still in the brilliant soils of Devon.
It shows again in the contrasting pallor of fields which rest
on chalk. But in most parts of Britain the soils, and there-
fore the husbandly that goes with them, owe most to the
work of the iccshccts and glaciers. In die Midlands, in East
Anglia, all diosc boulder clays, tills, drifts, crags and brick-
earths, all those more parciciiJar ft'aturcs such as end moraines
and eskers, though of course they derive ultimately from
rocks, owe their present nature and disposition to die Ice
Age.

Finally, all soils owe something of their quality to the life
they have suppoitcd, to the vegetable and animal matter diat
falls back into them, builds up the humus, giving them what

140

DIGRESSION ON ROCKS, SOILS AND MEN

Englishmen have called their ‘good heart’. It is no empty,
sentimental term, for the structure of the soil depends on
tliis organic contribution, and it is a quality which cannot be
given by artificial fertilizers.

The organic clement is most dominant in the Fcnlands
whose pitch-black soils have been built up since tlic Ice Age
by the steady accumulation of bogs and sw^amps. Now,
reclaimed, walled against the sea, drained, the peat wastes
foot by foot, but still the fcnlandcrs can bring more wheat
out of their flat, dark fields than any other cultivators in tlie
world.

There arc all those special substances whicli natural history
has buried, folded or otherwise hidden in our fragment of
the earth’s crust; the metal ores — iron, lead, tin and even
briglit streaks of gold — the coal, china-clay and salt. All liavc
appealed to men at certain times or continuously, and have
lured them to move about the face of the land, to congregate
now in one region, now in another, to alter the character of
the land. These things have some place in the next chapter.
They have not the same intimacy for man, the same massive
significance, as the rock at his back or the soil from which,
though he likes to forget it, he must aWays nourish himself.

Even when already isolated by a developed consciousness,
men lived in clefts in the stone, or raised great blocks of it to
greet gods created to express human unity with the rest of
creation. With sharpening consciousness they began to
quarry it, to cut and shape it to express their various ideals.
Anvone who enters a Gothic cathedral must be aware that
he is walking back into the primeval forest of existence, with
birds, beasts, ntonsters and angels looking through the
foliage. But with classical building man was giving expres-
sion to that upper part of his consciousness which would cut

141

A LAND

itself more and more from its background to live in the
Ionic temple of the intellect. Yet in spite of the Ionic
temple, in spite even of the greater perils of the concrete
office block, the most sensitive and the simplest men have
never forgotten their origins, their relationship with the land.
Now Henry McM:)re can be used to symbolize a reaction
towards it. His curves follow life back into the stone, grope
round the contours of the woman he feels there, pull her
out witli the accumulating layers of time, the impressions of
detailed life, marking the flesh of her universal existence.

CHAPTER VIII

Land and People

R ecalling in tranquillity the slow posses-
sion of Britain by its people, I cannot resist the
conclusion that the relationship reached its great-
^est indinacy, its most sensitive pitcli, about two
hundred years ago. By tlic middle of the eiglitecnth century
men had triumphed, the land was theirs, but bad not yet
been subjected and outraged. Wildness had been puslied
back to the mountains, where now for the first rime it could
safely be admired. Communications were good enough to
bind the country in a unity lacking since it was a Roman
province, but were not yet so easy as to have destroyed
locality and the natural freedom of the individual that
remoteness freely gives. Rich men and poor men knew how
to use the stufi of their countryside to raise comely buildings
and to group tlicm with instinctive grace. Town and
country" having grown up together to serve one another’s
needs now enjoyed a moment of balance.

Every town, every rural locality, had its special products
and skills, its peculiarities of cultivation, its delicacies and
local dishes. Round the coasts, too, whether their villages
climbed steeply above rocky bays or straggled along low
shores of sand and pebble, the fisherfolk were adapted to
our island outline, each region with traditional gear and
boats shaped partly by history and partly by use to take the
particular sea creatures that time had left in its waters.
Devonshire crabs and lobsters, Dover soles, Yarmouth
herring. In every part of die country generations of hands

143

A LAND

had shaped the tools necessary for its way of life, while
generations of tongues had shaped dialects apt for its
expression.

Glory he to God for dappled thini^s —

For shies of couple-colour as a brinded coio;

For rose-tnoles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh fire-coal chestnut Jails; fnches win^s;

Landscape plotted and pieced— Jold fallow and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

This is no sentimental blindness to tlic liarshncss of the
eighteenth century, to the vision of Crabbe or Ilogartli, but
from tlie point of view of these memoirs it would be sen-
timental blindness of another kind to ignore the significance
of its achievement — the unfdrcring fitness and beauty of
everything men made from the land they had inherited.

It had taken nearly a million years to reach this delicate
adjustment, this moment of ripeness; a million years, that is
to say, from the time when consciousness was sufikicntly
concentrated in man-like creatures to separate them by a
hairbreadth from their background.

It is not my purpose to try to recall much of that immense
span of the Icc Age when shadowy luunan beings liad hardly
emerged from among their fellow creatures. They, like the
plant and animal population, ranged to and fro with the
shifting of the icc — advancing northward across Europe
when the icesheets and glaciers retreated, withdrawing
towards Africa when the arctic cold returned. These fluc-
tuations stimulated change and the forms of life that returned
were never identical with those that had withdrawn; new
species arrived, old ones were modified or disappeared. As
for men, not only did they vaiy^ physically, but tliose
images which they alone carried within them changed also,

144

LAND AND PEOPLli

tlic images enabling them to shape tools in traditional but
evolving forms. Contemporary materialism and pre-
occupation with technology has led to an exaggeration of
the importance of tool-juaking as such — it may be far more
significant that primitive man stuck feathers in his hair — but
certainly as a beginning of the imposition of conscious mind
upon unconscious matter it has great significance. The
evolution of tools, slow and empirical though it was, seems
even for tliat remote time to be distinguished from the
evolution of physical forms by its deliberate purpose, its
direction towards a greater efficiency. That both the evolu-
tion of die ammonite and of human culture may be shadows
of larger events, perhaps even of larger purposes, is the hope
of us all and the faidi of many. We are, however, poorly
equipped as yet, and it is inevitable that men should be able
to sec the purpose in their own earlier activities but not in
the convolutions of the ammonites.

During all the warm interludes in the lee Age, men differ-
ing in appearance and with different traditions of tool-
making were at home in the British region. Yet even during
the longest of these intervals, between the second and the
third glaciation, when Britain enjoyed an almost tropical
cUmatc, there is no sign that any of diem extended dicir
range into northern England or Scotland.

It is symbolic of man’s creativeness that from the begin-
ning we know him from the things he made rather than
from liis bodily remains. The existence of a dinosaur can be
recalled only from the existence of its fossil; the presence of
man in Britain can be proved for a time long before his
earliest surviving bones. Nevertheless it would be ridicuLius
if in these memoirs I fulcJ to say something ot die oldest
human fragments found in our soil. Of the two most

K 145

A LAND

famous, Swanscombc Man is far more venerable than Pilt-
down Man. He and his kin were probably hunting in and
about the Thames valley during this long warm period when
the game included elephant and hippopotamus. His skull was
found in one of those huge gravel pits which arc rapidly
reducing the terraces of the Lower Thames. In brain capa-
city this savage was already approacliing Homo sapiens, and
he was an unambiguous member of the ancestral stock of
our species. There is no doubt, either, that he or his kindred
made the shapely flint hand axes found in the same gravel
beds at Swanscombc, It was tools of this kind whose dis-
covery in the eighteenth century- first stirred our memory of
these remote ages, set on foot a rumour of the existence of
antediluvian man.

Piltdown Man has proved far more elusive. One might
think he had left some dcvilrv'' in liis partially petrified bones.
For half a century strenuous efforts at recollection failed to
prove whether the fragments of human skull were contem-
porary with the very ancient animal bones or tlic crude flint
implements which lay with them in the Sussex gravel.
Moreover there was long, fierce and inconclusive dispute
as to whether the chinlcss, simian jaw could ever Iiavc been
attached to the high, well-shaped cranium so full of intel-
lectual promise as to be recognizably that of an ancestor of
the learned disputants themselves. I like this Yorrick who
clowns, makes a mock of us, even with his bones. At last,
however, he has been laid by the heels. A method for esti-
mating the antiquity of bone has been discovered — a power-
ful new aid in the hands of those who arc trying to recollect
the past. In constant conditions fluorine is absorbed into bone
at a steady rate and so provides a kind of non-mechanical
clock w^hich has in fact been keeping the time dirough hun-

146

LAND AND PEOPLE

dreds of tliousaiids of years. Reading this clock has shown
that skull and jaw arc of die same age and both very much
younger than the long-extinct animals’ remains. It is almost
certain, in fact, that Piltdown Man did combine a high
brow with chinlessncss and that he was living in Sussex
about a Iiimdrcd thousand years ago, in the period between
the third and the last glaciations. This would make him the
junior of Swanscombe Man by about a himdred and fifty
thousand years, and the only known representative of a
species of liunianity which, like Neanderthal Man, became
extinct with the final onset of the ice.

Perhaps because their cultural resources were now so
much greater, the final advance of the ice did not drive men
from western Europe, or even from the region of Britain.
At first, however, the dominant breed was a tough one,
probably better fitted than Swanscombe or Piltdown Man to
endure the rigours of the time. On the other hand the mental
capacity of these Ncandcrdial men was less. Their small
heads, the muscular drag of their heavy jaws, all those
elements of brutish strengtli which they shared with the
apes, prevented the expansion and fine configuration of the
brain. Yet the Neanderthal breed has an honoured place in
these memoirs because in so far as the recollection of the
remote past has spread among the people of Britain (and it is
already widespread), that past is symbolized for them by
Neanderthal Man. He is Prehistoric Man, Cave Man par
excellence. He lias an honourable place, too, because tlic
climate, the steely winds cutting along the edges of the ice,
drove him to the shelter of caves. Certainly thousands of the
tools of earlier Palaeolithic hunters have been taken from our
soil; here and there a flint working place has been detected,
while Piltdown and Swanscombe Man have left us their

X47

A LAND

Tcry heads, but in these caves parents and children Kved
folded in the rock, made tools, sat round the fire roasting
their meat, slept together, were bom and died. These arc
our first known human dwellings — let me call them that to
avoid any false use of die heavy" overtones clinging to the
word ‘homes’ — for tlic first time we can recall a com-
munity with a precise lodging place in this country, a claim
on it and a sense of belonging to it. I wish I could recollect
how far the consciousness housed under the low vaults,
behind the sloping foreheads and heavy brows, was con-
centrated, how fir it enabled these men to look out on the
world with some faint sense of detachment. A degree of
detachment is reflected in their ability to take flint and flake
it into a number of fcu*ms- — knives, scra})crs and others —
arid in their control of fire. Most significant of all, these poor,
shambling beings v'cre sufficiently aware of death to bury
their dead with some ceremony, setting wxapons beside
them and offerings of meat. Here surely we meet our
brothers, minds already afflicted with dcatli?

I will leave this as a symbol of dawning coiiscioiisnc.,5. Tlie
group of ugly creatures housed in the rock from which
tlicy liad sprung, aware of the cave walls cnclc'ising them in a
pocket of warmth and light, cutting tliCm off from the frosty
land outside; faintly aware, too, of one another. The narrow
opening of the cave was an eye with a vision of the outer
world, allowing the slow silting down to the depths of
mind of images of the sun and moon, of light and darkness.

Before the end of the Icc Age the Neanderthal men had
not only been dispossessed of their bleak hunting grounds in
Britain, but of life itself, having been hurried out of the
world by rivals in whom the qualities of mind had become
more strongly, more effectively concentrated. Men of our

148

LAND AND PEOPLE

own species, coming from Africa and the East, now spread
over those parts of Europe which were free from ice. They
wxre men potentially our equals, poorer only in the lack of
accumulated knowledge, the emotional and intellectual
experience we have gained with the passage of time. Their
practical ability was shown in the invention and perfecting
of stone and bone implements far niorc precisely designed
than ever before for the execution of particular tasks. In the
spear-tli rower and bow and arrow, too, they were experi-
menting however unconsciously with important mechanical
principles. But their technical achievements were not their
greatest. It w^as these hunters wfio in France and Spain
created the paintings and sculpture tliat have been one of the
most astonishing of all our recollections of the past. Here
for the first time was consciousness receiving impressions
from the exterior world and expressing them again through
the power of the imagination. These projections, every-
thing from the mammoth and rhinoceros to the delicate
ibex, painted on cave walls, modelled in clay, carved in
bone, stone and ivory, have a significance and a reality fir
greater than any reconstruction of these animals an anatom-
ist might make from their surviving bones. In them already
is something of man and his fleeting, tormenting apprehen-
sions.

The British region was only on the fringes of tliis rich
hunting culture. Then as now the climate was a deterrent,
and the cave accommodation cannot have been considered
good when compared with that of the great limestone
ravines of the Dordogne. Nevertheless, hunting parties did
come, and as a reminder of their presence have left tools in
many open-air sites and a few'' caves. Unhappily survivals of
their art are negligible, and of the few rough engravings

149

A LAND

there arc, one or two have a slight sexual interest, but none
has any aesthetic merit.

Among their mortal remains, the hunter who had been
ceremonially buried in the Paviland cave of the Gower
peninsula was given a certain notoriety by Dean Buckland
under the name of the Red Lady, but I prefer to turn rather
to the skeleton from Gough’s Cave, Cheddar, laid out in its
glass case like Lenin or a saint. There is no other place in
Britain where it is easier to imagine the daily life of the
Palacolitliic hunters tlian in this magnificent Mendip gorge
— the paths winding up to the cave mouths, women sitting
in die sun wLile they suckle babies or pluck nits from tJieir
cliildren’s licads, young boys scrambling on die rocks, while
a returning hunting party is siUioucttcd against the sky as one
by one they cross the lip of the gorge. To-day charabancs
follow the zigzag road cleft for them — bringing crowds to
stare at dieir ancestral bones.

The dcvelopincnt of human culture during this last phase
of die Old Stone Age seems extraordinarily rapid when it is
compared with the leisurely tens of thousands of )'ears
preceding it. This acceleration, representing, as it must, a
sudden sharpening of consciousness, may have been brought
about by one tremendous event. Men had learnt to speak.
We all know (or heaven lielp those who do not) that in a
speaking world speech is not necessary for some of the most
subtle communications possible to man. Like the highly
educated who alone arc ready to deride education, we may
now begin to think that too many words will be our un-
doing. Speeches may have cured us of any admiration for
speech. But this was a wmrld in which no one had ever
spoken. For untold ages men must have had their means of
expressing the ancient emotions of pain, desire, hate and

150

LAND AND PEOPLE

triumph, but reason had no language. Now at last language
made it possible to describe actions without performing
them, to report on experience, to weigh and to discuss.
Through recollection and anticipation speech created past
and future and made it possible to modify one in order to
shape the other. Hence the acceleration of change.

If these consequences of a coherent language tended fur-
ther to divide man from nature, words must soon have been
used to serve his contrary desire for reunion with the uncon-
scious world he had left. In the infmey of culture ritual and
art were one, and the hunters who drew the animals they
desired and performed ritual dances in fissures deep in the
rock must also have had poetry to evoke this physical and
spiritual sympathy, using the poetic image that is ‘the
human mind claiming kinship with everything that Hves and
has lived*.

There is a sense in which the ordering of speech has a
direct effect also on die land. Names could be attached to all
those features of the countryside that attracted men’s
attention or were of significance in their lives. Mountains,
rivers, springs, places wlicre reindeer congregated, where a
giant mammoth had been trapped or a famous hunter killed.
Above all, places associated with ancestral spirits, gods and
heroes. Place names are among the things that link men
most intimately with their territory. As the generations pass
on these names from one to the other, successive tongues
wear away die syllables just as water and wind smooth the
rocks; so they become rounded, slip more easily from tongue
to tongue, perhaps lose their meaning, yet grow more and
more closely attached to the land itself So closely, indeed,
that often place names outlast the language that made them,
remaining as evidence of the former presence of dispossessed

151

A LAND

or submerged peoples. A geologist finds proof of the exis-
tence of past life ill fossils, an archaeologist in objects men
have made; an etymologist looks instead to place names
which after thousands of years recall the talk of forgotten
tribes.

A name can become a part of the cliaracter of a place, and,
when caught up in the art of its people, can assume a life
and significance of its own. The Forest of Arden, Benbulbin,
the River Duddon, Wcnlock Edge or Flatford Mill, tliey
are all strands w'ovcn into our culture. Count those peoples
fortunate who, like ourselves, have been able to keep the
W'arp threads of the fibric long, their histories in one piece.

We can have inherited no single syllable from the names
given by Palaeolitiiic hunters, but never since their day have
our landmarks been without them, without some sound to
enrich and confinn their per sonality.

These hunters remained when the final retreat of the ice
left Britain a dreary landscape of meres, bogs, screes and all
the litter of glaciation. By about 8000 B.C., ho w' ever, the
scene w'as changing. Every summer piiic coixs ripened and
burst and the winged seeds travelled on the wind; everj^
year the p)incs encroached further on the open lands of the
north and west. In time Britain w'as black with them, heavy
with coniferous darkness.

The trees drove out the game herds that had grazed the
open country and so destroyed the livelihood of the hunters
who preyed up’ion them. The men wiio now came to Britain,
although they w^crc the descendants of other Palaeolithic
hunting peoples, had already adapted their habits to the new
conditions. Instead of ranging freely over wide territories,
they were confined to the forest edges, wlictlicr it was
along the sea coast, by inland lakes and rivers, or m areas

LAND And people

wlicrc poor soil or exposure discouraged the growth of
trees.

The sunless forests, so like those that still mask much of
northern Europe, must have seemed imchanging enough to
the early Mesolithic food gatherers who had to live among
them, but with the foreshortening of time they can be seen
as a black wave sweeping in the wake of the retreating
whiteness of the ice as it ebbed northwards. In their wake
again followed a greener wave, the deciduous forests of oak
and elm w hich w’ould still form the natural covering of this
country had W'C not stripped it off

This spread of the deciduous trees, as I have already said,
w^as probably hastened by another event — the junction of
the North Sea with the Channel and the ensuing isolation of
Britain. To us now, islanders of such long standing, tliis
seems a dramatic and significant happening, but for the
scattered groups of food gatherers it can have meant very
little. They were fimiliar with stretches of coast, but can
hardly have comprehended islands and continents, for neither
interest nor know ledge stretched much beyond their own
hunting grounds. Even those communities that lived in the
soutli-cast cannot have been much affected, for the channel
widcncci only gradually, and boats were now an effective part
of man’s equipment. The conditions in northcni Britain had
so far iniprovcd that Mesolithic hunters and fishermen were
able to push up die wx^st coast of Scotland, wiiilc even the
exposed Pcnnincs were much visited as summer hunting
grounds. But the population remained small, and although
some tribes, particularly those living in south-east and
eastern England, had heavy flint axes capable of felling and
shaping timber, the mark dicy could make on the face of
Britain must have been slight indeed. A few trees cut —

153

A LAND

extending here and there to a small clearing; boats moving
on the rivers and along the shore; some huddles of low-
roofed huts, sometimes on platforms raised above the marsh,
sometimes with floors sunk into the ground for greater
warmth and shelter. On winter nights their fires might
throw a ring of light, marking out a diminutive and weakly
held human world, but a world lit by the sound of voices,
by the faint flickering of mind.

Turning away from these islands to see the ancient world
as a whole, it is plain that these small encampments were
already backward, their way of life no longer the only way
knowai to men. In late Palaeolithic times Europe had been
supreme, the work of her artists the greatest achievement the
world had known, but now the continent was stagnant,
choked and deadened by interminable forests. While
European savages were still using their cunning to live off
their lands without changing tliem or imposing themselves,
many Eastern societies had long abandoned this passive
habit. This is not die place to repeat tl)c familiar, though still
astonishing, history of the sudden rise of civilization in the
Middle East, where within a few thousand years city life had
grown from its roots in primitive agriculture and stock
raising. Nor is it my purpose to trace in detail the story of the
slow, indirect and partial impact of tliis revolution on life in
Britain, of the three tliousand years that it took for the
elementary ideas of a farming economy to spread so fir
among the western mists, storms and forests. They did
come, even wlnlc the yet more difficult idea that in the place
of his ring of firelight man could create his own w'orld
within city walls was delayed in the Mediterranean for
another two thousand years. When about 2500 b.c. Neo-
lithic peoples began to reach Britain across the still narrow

154

LAND AND PEOPLE

sleeve of the Channel, they brought, witli their livestock and
seed wheat and barley, a promise of deep-seated change.
Peering through time, it is easy to ignore the solidity of die
past, to see abstractedly ‘the Introduction of Farming’. I
want only to remember that tlierc was a day, as real as
to-day when the hens arc cackling in my neighbours’ back
garden and Mr. Bevin is flying back from another United
Nations conference, when the first of tlicse boats groped
along our coasts looking for a good landing place or a river
that promised an entry to the interior. That there was a
moment when the first domestic cattle and sheep, lowing
and bleating indignantly, were driven ashore and when men
and women disembarked to choose a camping ground for
their first night in our island.

At this period the formations of Jurassic and Cretaceous
Ages began to exert their strongest influence on human
affairs. The farming peoples might occasionally occupy
gravel terraces in rii’cr valleys wlicn these were open and
well drained, but for the most part they spread over the
English uplands, the chalk downs of Sussex and Wessex and
their extensions into Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire,
and on the limestone hills of the Jurassic belt.

Meanwhile those more ancient parts of Britain, the
strctclics of mountain and moorland which events of so
many millions of years ago had raised and which now
formed our Atlantic coasts, were not left unclaimed. The
historic role of these antique highlands has been to offer
resistance to new peoples and new practices when these have
swept across the narrow seas and lowland England, but to
allow something of the new clement to penetrate, altered
and moulded to suit traditional forms. They were usually, in
fict, the rocky fortresses of conservatism that they still are

155

A LAND

to-day when they hold at bay the main tide of die Industrial
Revolution. But at diis time a connection with the Mediter-
ranean thoroughfare of civilization gave them a more
positive, a more active part. Adventurers sailing from Spain,
Portugal and Brittany came to our western coast, and from
Conm^all to die Orkneys fitted themselves into its fretted
line, setthng on coastal plains, round sea inlets and estuaries,
rarely penetrating far from the sea. While the peoples living
on die English uplands must have been accustomed to look
down from dieir safer eminence into die tangled forests of
die plains and valleys, these other tribes instead w^ould look
upwards at the stark and hostile country of the mountain
crests. Their coming, and the establishment of this Atlantic
coast route to the Mediterranean, meant that for many cen-
turies the highlands would have their owai contribution to
make to the development of human life in this country.

The occupation of Britain by Neolithic peoples could not
fail to have a profound effect on die character of die islands.
The JVlcsolithic hunters had studied die habits of their fellow
creatures — the routes of the deer, the coming of salmon to
our rivers, the movements of mackerel and licrring slioals,
the spring and autumn flights of geese. With simple craft
dicy devised dieir snares and fish traps, their nets, hooks,
harpoons, bows and arrows to enable diem to claim their
tithe of this natural harvest. Tlic Neolithic farmers were
humble enough, they could not foresee how' their successors
would destroy die forests and subjugate the wliole land, but
they came with an additional equipment of conscious pur-
pose and of will. Working where the conditions were man-
ageable on the relatively open hills and round the fringes of
the mountains, they set themselves to begin the domesti-
cation of die land. They felled trees, and burnt undergrowth

156

LANX> AND PEOPLE

to improve the pasture for their flocks and herds and fiet
the soil for the cultivation of their wheat. They embanked
and fenced hilltops as cattle corrals and built themselves huts
which were perhaps not very substantial but whose rect-
angular forms must have been conspicuous in their wild
surroundings.

This same will, this refusal merely to accept, led the
Neolithic peoples to success in another niost remarkable
enterprise. Not content with surface flints, they went in
pursuit of the larger, more readily worked nodules bedded
in the chalk. Widi antler picks taken from the foreheads of
deer, and shovels from tlie shoulders of oxen, they saUik pits
and followed the scams of flint with a network of galleries.
They were the first men to cut down through the accumula-
tions of time to reach hidden resources which would then be
used to transform the land itself.

Their mining has left its mark on the countryside in the
grass-grown pits and spoil heaps that pock the turf in many
places on the Sussex Downs, in Wiltshire, and most con-
spicuously of all at Grimes Graves, in Suffolk. Here flint is
still being woiked to-day. The Snares were for generations
the leading knappers, and I remember going to see the Snare
family in their Thetford workshop. The cabin was deep in
silica dust and flakes, and a neat-wristed man in a leather
apron sat knacking gun flints and tossing them into a large
barrel, already half full of the glistening black squares.
They were to go, I was told, to Africa. Others now bring us
dollars by their sale to those curiously atavistic organizations,
the flint-lock gun clubs of the United States.

The mined flint was used mainly for making heavy axes
suitable for tree-felling; other axes, equally effective, were
made from the tough igneous rocks of die highlands and,

137

A LAND

like the flint variety, were widely traded throughout the
country. The products of sponges and of volcanoes, both
long extinct, were being turned by hiunan will against the
domination of the forests.

The Neolithic peoples showed the new spirit of mastery in
another small but significant accomplishment; they were the
first to use our local clays to make pottery. They knew how
to take and prepare it, and, by firing, deliberately to change
its chemical nature to produce the jars and pots now needed
for dairy produce and many other domestic employments
unknown to the old hunters. Before the introduction of
metallurgy, this was the only activity by which men took
hold of the raw material of their land and changed not only
its form but its substance.

It was not, however, for directly material ends that these
firming communities put out their greatest energies or made
their deepest mark on the countryside. They had brought
with them from the Mediterranean the worship in some
form of that variously named divinity tlie Great Goddess or
Earth Modicr and the attendant male god who is her son or
lover. It may well be that throughout the ancient world
there were in fact only two high gods, the Earth Mother
and that opposite principal represented by Zeus, Jehovah,
the Sky Father — all lesser divinities representing no more
than special attributes of these great ones.

Several rough effigies have been found in Britain, some-
times caiwed in chalk, a substance which must at all times
luivc recalled the flesh of the White Goddess. At the bottom
of one of the mine shafts of Grimes Graves a figure of the
goddess w’as discovered enthroned above a pile of antlers on
which rested a chalk-carvcd phallus. This slirinc had been set
up in one of the few pits that by chance had failed to strike

158

LAND AND PEOPLE

the flint bed, and Our Lady of the Fhnt Mines, it seems, was
being asked to cure sucli sterility. It is worth meditating on
this story, for it perfectly represents the unity of life tliesc
people enjoyed. They were confident that by carving the
symbols of a woman and a phallus and rendering the
appropriate ritual words, movements, and offerings, they
could ensure an increase of flint just as readily as their
fellows could multiply their calves and lambs.

The spirit of the Great Goddess must also have presided
over the religious observances centred on die megalitliic
tombs. These tombs, our earliest stone architecture and an
extraordinary manifestation of the energy and purpose of
the Neolithic peoples, still survive in numbers along our
Atlantic seaboard. There are no images or symbols of the
goddess in our megaliths comparable to tliose found in
France; her symbolism, nevertheless, is implicit in the whole
structure, in the carthfist chamber carefully hidden, made
cave-like, below a huge mound of earth or stones. These
massive communal vaults were not intended simply for a
backward-looking cult of the dead or the appeasement of
ancestors; they were to suggest a return to the Earth Mother
for rebirth, the association of death with fecundity which
inspires all the myths of the goddess and dac dying god. In
this sense they represented the timeless unity of the tribe,
of its members, dead, living and unboni all enclosed within
their common matrix, the rock and the earth.

The nature of Neolithic society in Britain has been for-
gotten for all time, but I myself do not doubt that whether
or no it can properly be called matriarchal, the women were
its foundation. It rested on their eardiiness, their interest
in fecundity and physical creation ; they rcjiiained, the sons-
in-law, the husbands came to them. It may even be that dicir

139

A LAND

influence towards good sense, and their conservative power,
were enough to keep the men from warfare — for the Neo-
lithic peoples have left no obviously war-like equipment
behind them.

Struggling to recall the activities and habits of diese early
populations of Britain die imagination seeks to know what
diey looked like, wishing to give features, form and colour-
ing to these men and women pulling in their nets, gathering
fruit and nuts, working in their com plots or lolling in the
shade near their grazing flocks. It is a curious chance diat
while we have many jiicmories of the doings of the Meso-
lithic hunters, we have none of their bodily form ; no single
relic has survived in Britain. Judging, however, bodi from
their palaeolithic ancestors and their later descendants it is
hkely that they were a fairish people, early members of die
Nordic race. This name has now been given a false and a
hideous ring by the atrocities associated with it, yet 1 cannot
sympathize with those people who in the name of enlighten-
ment seem almost to try to convince us that it is impossible
to distinguish a Swede from an African. From the time when
the lands of northern Europe were freed from the ice,
descendants of the old limiting stocks inhabited them and
were predominantly fair. That has never been a virtue,
but is still a fact.

For die Neolithic peoples, whether those who crossed the
Channel or those wdio sailed up the Atlantic coast, there is
plenty of material for memory'; their custom of burying the
dead in communal tombs has led to die survival of many of
their skeletons. It is not difficult to recall wliat they were like
for they are still among us. In many parts of Wales it is
possible to come upon diem, perhaps a whole fimily liay-
making on a steep liillside. With their black hair and eyes

i6o

LAND AND PEOPLE

and that rich complexion in wliich a warm colouring glows
through a bro wn skin they would not look out of place in
a Sicilian olive grove. Looking at such people it is not
difficult to accept their Mediterranean ancestry or to believe
that these ancestors brought with them the Mediterranean
Mother Goddess, a more primitive and darker Mary.

Into a land in which the two contrasting stocks were
mingling, there broke fresh invaders, who differed from
them both in appearance, and also, as I believe, in liabits of
life and thought. Tlicse invaders, wlio entered Britain by
many harbours along the south and east coasts, were strong
in physique, with a noticeable round-headed Alpine element,
warriors who fittingly represented the Indo-European
peoples who did so much to disturb the peace of Europe
after 2000 b . c . They would be high pastoralists, a restless
patriarchal society in which the masculine principle had
raised the Sky God to pre-eminence. Their collision with the
Neolithic Mediterranean peoples was inevitable and direct.
As pastoralists, dicy, too, wanted the open pasture of the
Jurassic and Cretaceous uplands, and with their warlike
tradition, tlieir stronger bodies and their superior bronze
weapons they had no difficulty in taking what they wanted.
The classic scene for the defeat of predominantly mat-
riarchal societies by Indo-European warriors was in Greece,
where the overthrow of die goddess and her subjects has
recently been lamented by Robert Graves. A similar hap-
pening is commemorated in northern mythology by the
defeat of the Vanir gods, Nerthus and Frey, by the Anses of
the family of Odin. Professor Hodgkin has written of tliis*
Tt was the struggle between the cult of Modier Earth on the
one hand — bountiful Mother Earth, with her gods who gave
peace and who blessed agriculture with plentiful increase —
L 161

A LAND

and on the other hand the heroic gods, the gods of war who
gave victory/

This struggle, with its inescapable result, took place in
Britain at the beginning of the Bronze Age nearly four
tliousand years ago. Its effects were to be lasting. The Indo-
European aristocracy, renewed again and again by Celtic,
Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and Norman conquerors, has
held its ascendancy until recent times. I sliould say that so far
as Britain is concerned it made its last stand with the guards
regiments that were cut to pieces at Calais in 1940. What is
succeeding it no one can as yet distinguish.

This Indo-European occupation of Britain profoundly
altered the relationship between human communities and
the land on which they lived. This is materially manifest in
the abandonment of communal burial in earthfist burial
chambers in favour of the interment of single individuals
under round barrows, and by the replacement of the com-
munal tombs as centres of a death and rebirth ritual by the
open temples of the type of Avebur}^ and Stonehenge.
Though the fmious owl-faced idols from Folkton may
represent some survival of the goddess (who, indeed, is
always bound to reassert herself after defeat, just as the
women of defeated peoples creep into the beds of the con-
querors and become the mothers of their sons), all the sur-
viving female statuettes and all the phalli were carved by the
Neolithic peoples. The nature of the inward change in the
relationsliip is a matter for the individual imagination — but
as a stimulus I will add two of Robert Graves’s verses.

Swordsman of the narrow Ups,

Narrow hips and murderous mind
Fenced with chariots and ships.

By your joculators hailed
The mailed wonder of mankind.

Far to westward you have sailed.

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LAND AND PEOPLE

Yot4 whoy capped with lunar gold
Like an old and savage dunce ^

Let the central hearth go cold^

Grinned, and left us here your sword
Warden of sick fields that once
Sprouted of their own accord.

For these memoirs that change was the most momentous
of the Bronze Age, yet the accompanying change in the
physical relationship between men and their land was not
very great. The invaders, too, needed open grazing and
although they perhaps occupied river valleys and the eastern
coastal plains in greater force than their predecessors had
done, it was the chalk uplands that remained the most
desirable, prosperous and populous territories of Britain.
They did push slowly westward into the mountains and
towards the Atlantic coast regions still dominated by the
megalith builders, but there they came very much under the
influence of the old population, and the old religion, and
were even drawn into the mcgalithic cults. Indeed, it may
have been this survival of the goddess among the mountains
that much later gave rise to the matriarchal tradition in
Pictish society, including the inheritance of kingship
through the mother. Was it her name of Alba tliat was given
to Scotland, and sometimes, in the form of Albion, to the
W'hole of Britain ?

The importance of the uplands and particularly of the
chalk hills to the Bronze Age pastoral peoples is certain, and
it is no less sure that many centuries of grazing large herds
of cattle and sheep must have involved a further clearance of
trees and bushes. One added purpose for which wood must
have been taken was for funeral pyres. By the middle of the
Bronze Age cremation had become almost universal. I
mention this partly, perhaps, because it calls up a dramatic
scene — the tribesmen summoned and the pyre built just

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A LAND

below the summit of the hill not too far above the edge
of the forest from which the wood had been brought —
either felled, or, more likely, dead timber dragged from
the tangled undergrowth. I like to think I can recall that the
burning took place at night, for we are all attracted by the
notion of a cave of light in the darkness, of faces illumined
and gigantic shadows, and of the black waves of the forest
reaching up, hardly touched by the glare. When the heat
had died away and no more than a few stumps were still
glowing beneath the white ash, the burnt bones were col-
lected and put still hot into the urn and, with what further
ceremonies I cannot even pretend to know, the urn was
covered by the burial mound w^hosc perfectly circular out-
line may have symbolized that of the solar disc.

The importance of the chalk hills is shown by the choice
of Salisbury Plain, the centre of the Cretaceous W'Orld, for
the two greatest sacred enclosures, those of Avebury and
Stonehenge. Stonehenge is farther removed than any other
prehistoric monument from what I may call natural archi-
tecture. Here for the first time in Britain we see men shaping
stone into rectangular forms, cliopping out tenon and mor-
tice and designing their massive trilithoiis. But these temples
have a wider significance. As fiir away as the Orkneys, as
Derbvshirc, Norfolk and Devonshire, there were others,
smaller and simpler than Avebury and Stonehenge, but with
at least as great a similarity of plan as is found among
Christian churches. Such unifonnity suggests some degree
of religious colicsion, possibly even a scattered priesthood,
a primitive foreshadowing of the Druids. I find this sig-
nificant because a widening of consciousness beyond the
immediate tribal territories that closed the horizon of most
men’s lives must have meant that now, and probably for

164

LAND AND PEOPLE

the first time, there were individuals who carried in tlieir
minds some fiiiit image of Britain as a whole, who could
perhaps have scratched a rough outline of our triangular
island.

If I have used religious uniform iiy to suggest the develop-
ment of a consciousness embracing the whole land, I might
equally well have used trade as evidence of tliis growing
coherence. There was nothing absolutely new in the bronze
industry. Mining had already been practised for flint, while
potting had meant the deliberate subjection of natural
materials to chemical change; the marketing of dint and
stone axes had been a trade that broke the complete self-
sufficiency of each small community. But in the bronze
industry all these activities became fir more difficult and
complex. The necessary ores did not occur together; the
tin loaded into the Cornish rocks by igneous heat had to be
brought together with copper from Ireland, North Wales
or Scotland before the smelting and alloying cc^uld begin.
This work was itself infinitely more expert, further removed
from common sense, tlnan the homely craft of potting. Out
of rough dark lumps hammered from the rock, men could
produce this flashing, dangerous molten substance and cast it
into forms that were v/holly their own. As an act of ima-
gination it was considerable, but as an act of will it was an
immense achievement.

The trade in ores and the marketing of the finished goods
throughout Britain and western Europe demanded the
establishment of commercial routes by land and sea which
served at once to bind Britain more closely together and
to open channels of information. Although it is possible to
travel known routes without any very coherent picture of
die map, tliis activity of the Bronze Age traders must have

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A LAND

given them some awareness of the form of these islands and
of their relation to the Continent. The land was, in short,
emerging further and furtlier into the clarity of conscious-
ness.

The action of its volcanoes had also endowed western
Britain with a more precious and peculiar metal. The gold of
the Wicklow Hills was early found by the prehistoric pros-
pectors and shaped into necklets, ear-rings, armlets, and
other oniaments for the human body, which were traded
as widely as the native bronze. By the end of the Bronze
Age the ornaments began to turn into pure wealth, into
ring-money, foreshadowing die gold rings that glitter so
often in heroic verse, gifts heaped upon one another by
kings and warriors as proof of their greatness and aristo-
cratic generosity — ‘The Prince of the Scyldings, Bestower
of Rings’.

I am puzzled by this ancient bond bctw^cen men and gold,
a bond fir more pow-erful and tyramiical now than it was
four tliousand years ago. It is not that I am incapable of
understanding the economics of the gold standard — though
even there the fact that a nation will give vast quantities of
food and goods for lumps of metal to be at once hidden
underground wiiuld seem to belong to a fairy-tale world. It
is one of the extravagant fantasies that are accepted without
surprise by the most prosaic. The power of this metal can-
not depend upon its rarity alone. There has always been a
fascination in this bright stuff that shines like the sun; it is as
though it came from the ground so laden with symbolism
that men, always troubled by intiiiiations of mystery, seized
upon it and exalted it until its name is one of the most
evocative words in every language. It stands for the pure
heart and for die root of evil, it veins our life and our

166

LAND AND PEOPLE

literature as it veins mountains; a perpetual proof of the
power inherent in the clifFcrcntiatcd, the fully individual.

The use of more subtle materials, bronze and gold, made
possible the refinement of those varieties of culture which are
among the most significant and moving facts of human
existence. Although the inward images that shape the
creations of man exist only in the individual mind and
achieve value through individual vitality and feeling, the
forms come largely from without; men can work only in
the idiom of their time and place. Lawrence wrote:

IVhctt the Hitidus weave thin wool into long, long lengths of stuff

ivith their thin dark hands and their wide dark eyes and their still
souls absorbed

they arc like slender trees putting forth leaves, a long white
web of living leaf
the tissues they weave,

and they clothe themselves in white as a tree clothes itself in its
own foliage.

As until cloth, so with houses, ships, shoes, wagons or cups or loaves.

Men might put them prth as a snail its shell, as a bird that leans
its breast against its nest, to wake it round,

as the turnip models his round root, as the bush wakes flotvers and
gooseberries . . ,

This is an essential part of the matter, but with it goes also
the power of time and place. The snail’s shell is changing as
the ammonites changed during their scores of millions of
years, but with our own perspectives we can watch only tlie
evolution of what we ourselves put forth, our owm culture.
There were already local distinctions in the products of stone
and clay of the Neolithic peoples in Britain, but they were
rough and unsatisfying; now with rich ornaments, nobly
proportioned weapons and tools, British culture achieves its
own highly distinguished forms.

Before the end of the Bronze Age, but when tlic earlier

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A LAND

peoples and their cultures were already fused and honx)-
geneous, fresh invaders came to interrupt the development
of native habits and traditions. These were Celtic-speaking
peoples from France and the Low Countries. For a thousand
years until the Roman conquest they were to continue
their incursions, each group finding what space it could
among the existing population, some imposing themselves
by force, others edging in more peacefully where resistance
was slight.

These invaders profoundly affected the manner in W'hich
men lived from the land, they introduced languages which
are still spoken by millions of people in these islands, and
they added something to our physical and mental inheri-
tance which is alive and active in everything we do. Because
in Wales and some parts of Scotland there arc small dark
people speaking Celtic languages there is a tendency to
think that the original Celtic invaders were of this racial type.
This was not so. Tlic Celts, in so far as they had a racial
character, were neither small nor dark, these features come
frojn far earlier Neolithic stocks. The old language and the
still more ancient ficc alike have survived, and have united,
under the conservative influence of the mountains.

Until this late point in the Bronze Age the interests of die
people had remained those of pastoralists. They cultivated
corn, but in small irregular and probably impermanent
patches; their main concern was to follow the seasonal pas-
tures for their cattle. As a result, althougli men, women and
children must have been familiar enough with their tribal
territories, they lacked that closer sense of attachment which
may be given by a substantial and permanent homestead.

It was the Celtic invaders who introduced settled farm-
ing. Where before the soil had been tilled by hand, the Celts

i68

LAND AND PEOPLE

used an ox-drawn plough, and with the plough a regular
system of fields whose boundaries might have remained
constant for centuries. If the rectangular meshes of these
field systems still show on many of our chalk downs when
the light is favourable, they may be said still to be in use in
some parts of the West Country and in Ireland. Agriculture
of this kind led to the permanent farm and settled village,
together with the habits of mind dependent upon generation
after generation being born in the same place and even in the
same house. With this change the development of a peas-
antry became possible, and indeed unavoidable. Once a way
of life was established in which the old expected the young
to inherit their houses and fields, there was, I believe, no
equally deep change in the feeling of country life until
subsistence farming was displaced by industrial agriculture.
Variations in land tenure and methods of working, in legal
status and in religion were always affecting it, but never I
think so completely or so near the root.

During the period of Celtic immigration one of those
technical revolutions took place that make the cojincctions
between men and their land always a little insecure, leaving
their trail of abandoned fields, mines, quarries, harbours,
mills and factories. It was about five hundred years before
Christ that iron began to take the place of bronze for tools
and weapons. This meant a gradual but inexorable weaken-
ing of the trade in copper and tin ores and in the higlJy
organized international trade in bronze goods; it meant also
a permanent lowering of the importance of the mountain
country whose rocks held the ores of tin and copper. Iron
occurs in the younger formations, particularly in the Jurassic
and succeeding Cretaceous, and its adoption therefore
shifted the metal industry eastward into lowland England.

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A LAND

The main centres of early iron working were in the Forest
of Dean, tlie ironstones of the Jurassic belt and in the Sussex
Weald. The sources of the new metal being more wide-
spread and accessible than those of bronze, the industry was
more parochial in its organization; the blacksmith could
hardly become the international traveller, the bearer of news,
rumours and tales that the bronze founder had been.
Nevertheless, iron put effective tools into every man’s hands
anei so equipped the population far more effectively for their
struggle with the land.

The invaders brought with them another possession older
than the knowledge of iron : the Celtic language and all that
it implied of modes of thought and imagination. The
earliest corners, it appears, sp('>kc the form of the tongue
ancestral to Gaelic and Irish, while the Brythoiiic form that
WMS to give rise to Welsh and Cornish was introduced in
the Iron Age. It is amusing, and would to them have been
surprising, to think of the language introduced by these
rovers and warriors now being taught compulsorily under
regulations of the Ministry of Education. But I like to
imagine the sounds of it flowing like waiter ajnong the
mountains for three thousand years, a sound rising during
the day and by night fading to a faint amorous murmur.
Even in England many Celtic place names survive, often
attached to rivers or hills; the names of many towiis arc
Celtic or partly Celtic, among them Canterbury, York and
London. These names jut through those of die Anglo-
Saxon countryside, the English language that has flowed all
round them, rather as the Cleveland hills once jutted through
the iceshects.

The Celts have marked the countryside wnth their names,
and also with their buildings. I have said that the true centre

170

LAND AND PEOPLE

of a people’s interest and passion can be judged by the nature
of the buildings to which they will devote most labour and
most material. With these Iron Age tribesmen it was not
ancestral tombs, not temples, towards which they showed
this passion, but military fortifications, the forts that are still
so conspicuous among our hiUs and mountains. Some of
them have by one means or another become features of our
national consciousness; there is Chanctonbury Ring, where
the chaffinches sing in a lonely beech clump, presiding over
a wide stretch of the Weald, and Maiden Castle, a stupen-
dous monument drawn into our literature by Hardy; the
Wrekin where within the ramparts there was once an
Armada beacon, and now a winking red light to warn
aircraft off this precipitous outlier of the mountains. Others
of these forts, while they arc not funous in our country life
or hterature, make pleasant uncultivable retreats in an over-
crowded island. There often small boys will rehearse the
bloodier storniings of other days; sometimes the banks and
the hollows between them make picnic grounds or a
trystiiig place for lovers.

If lovers do make good use of these decaying forts, it
symbolizes the slow victories of the Great Goddess over her
rival. For the late Celtic societies that built them represent
the masculine ideal in one of its purest forms. If after the
early Bronze Age invasions the heroic ideal weakened and
the goddess offered herself again not perhaps on the throne
but in a host of local cults, the late Iron Age invasions cer-
tainly reimposed the values of a warrior society. Not only
did the greatest communal labour go to building massive
fortifications, but the gifts and skills of die Celtic artists
were used to make splendid armour and weapons — inlaid
swords, shields and hehnets, die whole heroic impedimenta

171

A LAND

of epic. It was not by chance that Caniuloduntun, the
last Celtic capital, was dedicated to Camulos, the god of
war.

It must in part have been the kind of society that long
survived in the Highlands, wlicre, as a self-righteous
soutlicnier observed, ‘the people of the country were averse
to industry. The spirit of clanship whicli prevailed was very
unfavourable to it. The different chnis spent a great part of
their time in avenging themselves on each other. The man
w'ho could best handle his sword and his gun w\as deemed
the prettiest fellow.’ Daniel Defoe, w^hen he saw clansmen
in Edinburgh, sneered (with Avhat deep undertones of social
envy and discomfi:>rt), ‘They arc all gentlemen, will take
affront from no man, and insolent to the last degree. But
certainly the absurdity is ridiculous to see a man in his
mountain habit, armed with a broad sword, target, pistol, at
his girdle a dagger, and staffs walking dowai the High Street
as upright and haughty as if he were a lord, and withal
driving a cow ! bless us — arc these the gentlemen ! said L’
Substitute a spear or sling for the pistol, and there you have
it — and with Gaelic still on the tongue.

Aldiough the acceptance of settled firming, the springing
up of farms, the .spread of fields, cart tracks and lanes, the
growtli of villages, must profoundly have altered the appear-
ance of the country, the main pattern of settlement remained
almost unchanged. It was still a settlement of the light soils,
of the hills and the well-drained river gravels. On the richer
or heavier soils, the forests still grew where they had grown
for more dian five thousand years, the humus and leaf mould
slowly mounting beneath them. Except for the arrival of
the beech tree during the Bronze Age, their appearance,
dieir atmosphere, cannot have changed significantly since

172

LAND AND PEOPLE

Mesolithic times. They were still full of wild animals —
wolf, bear, aurochs, lynx — but these did not appear to men
to be so dangerous as the impalpable tlireats — the hidden
eyes, the Terror of the Wild Wood to which stronger men
than Mr. Mole have given way.

Towards the end of the Iron Age, during the last century
of Britain’s prehistoric freedom and barbarism, this old
agricultural pattern began to shift towards the very different
one that was to be established by the time of the Domesday
survey and which is still maintained. The last pre-Roman
invadcis of Britain were a mixed Celtic and Teutonic people
who settled in the south-east and were still pushing victori-
ously deeper and deeper into the West Country at the
moment of the Roman conquest. They were a reinarkablc
people, and a people important in these memoirs for several
reasons. Their powerful and ambitious dynastic princes were
responsible for the formation of larger political units, until
their last great ruler, Ciuiobclin, from his capital of Camulo-
dmuim, was in control of the whole of the south-eastern
part of the island and was recognized as Rex BriUvmiae,
Perhaps it was the enhanced energy of their larger kingdojns,
and tlieir skill as iron workers, as well as habits of life
brought with tliem from the Continent, that made the Bclgae
begin the shift of settlement towards the forest lands. They
did not challenge the gross, waterlogged glacial clays of the
Midlands and some regions of East Anglia, but in many parts
of tlie Sussex Plain, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire they
cleared the fertile loam soils and raised harvests of wheat and
barley far heavier than were ever hoped for from the upland
fields. It was the beginning of a great letting in of hght
among the darkness of primeval Britain.

The estabhshnient of a powerful kingdom in the soutli-

173

A tAND

cast, tills increase in its fertility and the growth of cross-
Channel trade with the Roman Empire, hastened another
shift in the pattern of settlement. Ever since die coming of
the first Neolithic farmers, and more markedly since the
Bronze Age, the great sweep of downland known as
Salisbury Plain had been a focus of population and pros-
perity. Now that centre was to move to the south-east, not
immediately to London, for the twin liills on which the
city w^as soon to rise were still cut off by marsh and forest,
but to Camulodimimi, on the estuary of the Colne, its
natural precursor. No further princely graves were to be
added to those of the Bronze Age chieftains who lay imdcr
their moimds in the sacred areas round Avebury and Stone-
henge, eacli body resting in modest splendour with its
bronze, gold, amber or funerary vessels.

Writing of the Belgae I have come almost unawares on
another of the tuming-points in these memoirs. Has it been
noticed that they and dieir kings and cities have names,
names of their own, not invented for them by successors w-ho
try to remember them thousands of years after an anony-
mous death?

In a much earlier chapter I recorded the moment at which
hfe had drawn itself a clear enough outline to leave a record
in the rocks — spelt out in the bodies of the trilobites. Then
came the moment at which consciousness was so far
sharpened in the man-like apes that they were able to shape
tools and so open the record of human activity. Then again
the development of language; words assumed their out-
lines, but drawn only in sound, in the air, as elusive almost
as tlie calls of birds. Now comes the moment at which these
sounds must be caught and fixed in as enduring a form as
the statement of the trilobites. After tremendous struggles, a

174

LAND AND PEOPLE

kind of battling with ghosts, men have invented letters and
the sounds are caught and fixed.

Written words were attached to Britain for the first time
in the records of the Greek traveller Pytheas, who visited
the island in the fourth century before Christ. His own
writings have been lost, but he probably referred to the
land by some variant of the name Pritania and he started
tlie hare of the Cassitcridcs and die tin trade since pursued
by hundreds of thousands of written words from the pens
of Icanicd men. (That, of course, is one of the things about
written words — their amazing fecundity. They also breed
learned men.) Next there is Caesar himself; it is he who
records the name of the Belgae and that of the first individual
Briton to be known by name — Cassivelaunus, the Belgic
King who led the resistance against him. By now the name
of the land has become Britannia — but it can also be called
Albion.

So it begins, that vast accumulation of knowledge which
has already given the British Museum millions of volumes
and is adding to them at the rate of liundrcds a day. The un-
distracted, uncivilized memory is wonderfully capacious, yet
as even it caimot hold more than a limited amoiuit the
records of an illiterate society arc like water running into a
cistern with an open waste. Every new name or event that is
added will push out older ones into oblivion.

Although writing has not been so great a stimulus to
consciousness and self-consciousness as speech, it has cer-
tainly played a very great part in developing them, in
making possible our Prousts and Lawrences. It has had
another result of equal importance for diis record. It has
done much to destroy the direct intuitive relationship
between men and their surroundings. The members of

175

A LAND

a prehistoric tribal group knew everything about one
another and their territory and would listen to die words of
bards and travellers only as so much sweet moonshine to
weave into their own lives. The written word has given men
some superficial and theoretical knowledge of the whole
world, has enabled them to live emotionally in a murder
committed on die other side of the globe, while leaving
them ignorant of their neighbourhood and of their neigh-
bour. I will take as a symbolic example of this the nincteenth-
century report of the Royal Commission for Rebuilding the
Houses of Parliament. I will recall the minutes piling up,
neatly written by the able young secretary, the Report
issued: ‘for crystalline character, combined with a close
approach to the equivalent proportions of carbonate of
magnesia; for uniformity of structure, ficility and economy
in conversion . . .’ and then the decaying fiicc of the Par-
liament building. Beside that I will set a neat Wessex farm
built centuries ago from nothing better than sarsen, chalk
and straw.

In Britain, as often elsewhere, the first impact of WTiting
coincided with the imposition of an alien and more
developed w'ay of life. Tlic effect on the c<^untrysidc of an
imposition of tliis kind can be appreciated by anyone who
has looked down from an aeroplane onto a land where a
surviving rural population and culture are being partially
controlled from a remote urban centre. One can see the
manifestation of a spontaneous life delicately adjusted to its
immediate surroundings. The lane that curves round a wood,
that follows a contour or goes out of its way to reach a
bridge; the fields so nicely fitted into the valley; the houses
that have settled into a fold in the ground or sprung up
boldly on the crown of a hill. Then across this scene where

176

LAND AND PEOPLE

maji and nature are hand-in-glove cuts the work of those
intellectuals who plan from far off, who know that a road,
a railway, is needed from X to Y, five hundred miles away;
who see the need for a power station at Z. Their roads seem
to tie down the country-side with rigid lines insensitive to
wood or river or contour; the power station looks as
though it had been taken from a box and nailed to the
ground. I have seen this most clearly when flying over
Spain.

It was to be seen (thougli not from the air) in an extreme
form in Roman Britain. On to the negligent, intimate forms
of the prehistoric settlement the Imperial government
clamped its imperial policy — with roads, towns, frontier
systems. The country had the new experience of control by
trained and rational minds working tlirougli disciplined
bodies of men; Roman engineers with military corvccs
ruthlessly cutting roads dirough dense forest, up steep
gradients and raising them above marshes. Towns were
established at junctions or tlic crossing places of rivers, forts
at strategic points; when it became evident that the northern
mountains could withstand Rome, that their population
would not be tamed, then the great frontier fortification of
Hadrian’s Wall was completed along a line drawn firmly
from Tyne to Solway.

The tlicorctical possession of the very substance of die
island passed to Rome; all the lead, iron, copper, tin whose
mining the conquerors developed was the property of the
Imperial government.

The imposition and confiscation were not practised with-
out skill. The Roman intellect was subtle enough to know
that its planning could not immediately replace the old
loyalties of die heart. So far as was reasonable the Celtic
M 177

A LAND

tribal areas were kept as regions of local government and
their central strongholds, though normally moved down
from the upland situations that had gone with die pre-
Bclgic way of life, were made municipal capitals. Because
the texture of names is always interesting, and in order to
show how far the social topography of that time still shows
in outline behind our own, I will reproduce the main tribal
regions, with the capitals and their modern counterparts.

The Cantii; Duroveniuni Cantiacorum ; Canterbury. The
Rcgni; Noviomagus; Chichester. The Atrebates; Callcva
Atrebatum; Silchestcr. The Catuvcllauni; Vcrulamium;
St. Alban’s. The Trinovantes; Camulodunum; Colchester.
The Iceni; Venta Iccnorum; Caistor-ncxt-Norwich. The
Durotriges; Durnovaria; Dorchester (Dorset). The Duninonii;
Isca Dumnonioruni; Exeter. The Silures; Vciita Siliirum;
Caerwent. The Coritani; Ratac Coritanoriim ; Leicester.
The Cornovii; Viroconium Cornoviorum ; Wroxctcr. The
Brigantes; Isurium Brigantuni; Aldborough.

Wales is ahnost excluded, for although the mountain
ramparts were broken as they were not in Scotland, the
ancient peoples who lived among them were never alto-
gether reduced and remained for long under Roman
military government. Elsewhere the kings might be allowed
for a time to rule in the tribal capitals, ‘but tliis was a tem-
porary expedient, adopted only to ease the transition from
barbarian freedom to the full mcjnbership of the Roman
Commonwealth, which Tacitus called servitude’. How well
the planning was done is shown by the fact that only three
of these capitals are now desolate. Nevertheless it suffered
from the weaknesses of distant control; the higlily romariizcd
towns with their extravagant public buildings had not grown
spontaneously, were always perhaps a little artificial, and
with later vagaries of Imperial policy many began to decay.

178

LAND AND PEOPLE

Sometimes the old natural, uncivilized life crept back into
their formal arcliitecture; families lived in the once elegant
houses as they would live in a hut, lighting their cooking
fires on mosaic floors.

Possibly because they were a more genuine part of native
life it was through the country villas that Roman ideas cut
most deeply into Britain. Although a few villas belonged to
foreign officials and traders, most of them were built by
romanized Britons, sometimes even on the fomidations of
their old barbarous homes of wood and wattle. Indeed it
may liave been that for a time the family system of owner-
ship was maintained in them, but in every” other way they
represent the upper-class Celt’s determination to accept
civility and the repressions of intellectual control. Not only
was there the material amenity of brick and stone architec-
ture, central heating, pleasant verandas and fine furnishings,
but the scenes on mosaic floors show that the Britons were
trying tc.) absorb die mythology and the literature of a Medi-
terranean land few of them had ever seen. A short time
before tliis moment of writing some enthusiasts, possessed
by the lusts of conscious recollection, began to uncover a
villa in the pleasant Darent Valley in Kent. The place had
been forgotten for fifteen hundred years when in the eigh-
teenth century men sinking posts for the enclosure of Lulling-
stone Park brought up some handfuls of tesserae from a
mosaic floor. When recently the pavement was uncovered
the heads of women representing Spring (with a red-diroated
swallow on her shoulder), Autimm and Winter were found
in position and made secure, but the little coloured blocks
brought out of the eighteenth-ccntuiy” post hole had been
Summer — and she has returned to chaos. A step or two
away the tesserae had been holding a mild Latin joke for a

179

A LAND

millennium and a half in the subterranean darkness of a
Kentish wood. Above a representation of Europa and the
bull is written :

Invida si tauri vidisset Jutw Natattis

Justins Aeolias isset ad usque domes.

The suggestion that Juno would have more cause for
jealousy if she could see her husband carrying off Europa is
hardly supported by die picture — Roman provincial mosaic
work is a frigid incdiLim for representing the flesh of women.
But the spirit of the fourth-century country liouse is in the
inscription; the satisfaction in the sophisticated little literary
witticism and in the implied funiliarity with Virgil; the
hope of showing it to neighbouring Lumpkins who did not
know their Acneid, whose laughter was obviously hollow.
Lower down in the basement of an older house on this site
the excavators uncovered two marble busts, portraits of
substantial gentlemen, perhaps eminent officials of die
Province. One had fdlcii frc'>m his shelf and was found
pedestal up, biting the rnud, but the other emerged head-
first as the soil accumulated during fifteen liundred autumns
and winters was cleared away. The white countenance
looked placidly out of the hole, a little mud clinging to the
strands of his beard, lodged in the neat curls of his hair.
These second-rate works of a civilization never artistically
gifted, themselves decorous pieces of furniture, had been
overwhelmed in some catastrophe, then slowly buried in
this English valley, the Mediterranean marble l>’ing among
the native flints, pressed against the dark northern humus.
They stayed there, these Imperial gentlemen, while the
Anglo-Saxons re-established barbarism above their heads
and while barbarism turned to a Christian feudalism which

i8o

LAND AND PEOPLE

would have looked with suspicion on these staid and dig-
nified pagans — would perhaps have burnt them for lime.
It was bad luck that the busts were not found by the
eighteenth-century diggers who destroyed Summer, for
undoubtedly the owners of Lullingstone would have de-
lighted in these genuine classical works coming from their
own estates, saving them from the swindles of foreign
dealers. They missed another opportunity with the Vic-
torians iji whose aesthetic climate they would have been so
perfectly at home. So fate left then] there too long and
allowed them to emerge into a world whose taste had turned
against them, the world of Henry Moore that could receive
them only as interesting specimens, food for its curiosity like
the dinosaurs or Swanscombe Man. I ask, did these impassive
and unseen heads remain unchanged by the mental tides
flowing above them ; can they be said to have been the same
objects in the Dark Ages, in medieval times, in the eighteenth
or the nineteen til century?

There were other villas even in the Darcnt valley, many
others in Kent, for it was in the Home Counties and the rest
of southern England that these country houses and their
estates were first established and where they were always
most prosperous. As the military frontiers were secured,
however, they began to be built in East Anglia and South
Wales, up the main roads that cut the Midlands and even
on the fringes of the military area in Yorkshire. When-
ever possible, they were built on the slopes of sheltered
valleys, on just such sites as appear desirable for their
coimtcrparts to-day, and the cultivation of theii gardens
and estates continued die forest clearance begun by the
Belgac in the days of their independence For these heavier
soils, hea\der ploughs were needed, and with their use went

i8i

A LAND

the more efScient forms of long strip fields. The cultivation
of the villa estates was in fact more developed than that
of the peasants who still tilled the light soils in the tradi-
tion:d small Celtic fields and lived in hamlets or villages
of simple huts hardly clianged since the prehistoric Iron
Age. Rome had brought the peasants peace but had also
robbed them of many of its benefits by taxation; it had
given them a few trifling luxuries and participation in the
greatest Empire in die world, while taking their indepen-
dence and the endiusiasms of tribal loyalty. Except in these
fundamentals, their life was little changed.

So for nearly four centuries lowland Britain lay exposed
as a part of a Mediterranean empire. London was its capital
but hardly its living heart. The land and die people were
more self-conscious than they had ever been and yet they
lacked the inward-looking organic life of a nation. With its
roads, towns, villas and above all with its frontiers held by
troops drawn from far and near, it lay as a remote province,
an outwork defended against the vigorous, dark, un-
recorded life of the barbarians of the west and north. The
pressure of tliis life was always felt on the frontiers, and
when at last it began to break in it was as if unconscious
forces were reasserting themselves against the intellect. The
violent, fragmentary and incoherent raids from Ireland,
Scotland and northern Europe wxrc very like an upsurge of
passions and emotions long held in check by an intellectual
discipline represented by the Imperial army and administra-
tion.

When at last the soldiers and officials liad to withdraw
from the Province, the Britons were exposed and vulner-
able; they had lost the strength of instinctive life but had not
themselves the intellectual force to maintain a rational

182

LAND AND PEOPLE

organization. The unity of the Province broke up; there
were no longer jninds empowered to think on so large a
scale. During the first half of the fifth century, a period of
misty defence and blind attacks, the Britons tried to main-
tain tlieir romanized way of life. The owners of villa
estates can be imagined living much as the owners of large
country houses live to-day. Widi their servants and labourers
leaving them, the amenities and services of civilization
collapsing one after the other, they lived off tlicir own
produce, trying to maintain the civilities while fatuously
waiting for a rctiini of normal times. The forces of disin-
tegration were too strong for tliem. Leaking roofs were
not mended and each winter more tiles split and slipped;
the water came in and loosened the mosaic floors, tesserae
came up and were not reset. Then a gale, a heavy fall of
snow, and there was a collapse that could never be made
good; the tiny citadel of civilized living contracted still
further. At last the owner might abandon the struggle with
his derelict home and go to the nearest town where some
form of civic organization was tenuously maintained.
Sometimes a villa was brought to an end by the pillage, fire
and murder of a barbarian raid, but more often it was by
these quieter, sadder processes of decay.

Then the raids from Ireland and Scotland and northern
Europe developed into mass settlement by the northern
peoples. The Angles from Schleswig chose the more
northerly parts of the east coast of England; the Saxons from
the region of the Erns and Weser went to the south of them
and pressed up the Thames valley; the Jutes who settled
Kent and the Isle of Wight came not immediately from
Jutland but from the Frisian and Saxon coasts. Often the
bands were much mixed for they were formed of all those

183

A LAND

who cared to attach themselves to a well-known battle
leader. This was the source of barbarian strength, die power
bcliind the tremendous blows of their attack on the decaying
intellectual civilization of Britain. Heroic society was fired
by a fierce loyalty to comrades and an added devotion to the
leader, the ‘dear lord’. We cannot recall what that life was
really like, what treacheries and cruelties wTiit with it. But
its ideals are known in the forms in which they long
survived.

Edric, too, would help that day.

And ere the levy began

To stride forth with broad shields flung on them,

He was roused for battle play.

Performing the boast vowed to his lord,

To defend him to naked death.

Byrhtnoth too sets his array

Of warriors and inspirits them with his breath.

Riding and advising, he heartens the horde,

Tells them how to stand their ground, not give one inch away.
When he had rightly prepared them, this lord
Lights off his horse and stands among his people
Where he loved best to be —

Among his troops oj dependants and hearth^iordc.

Without a lord the heroic warrior was utterly forlorn.

The man who must alone forgo
His wise lord's sayings, dreametli so
When sorrow and sleep together hind
The poor heart singled from its kind ; —

He thinks that as of old his lord
Is taking homage from the horde,

And that he mounts to the great place
To kiss his master and embrace
And lay down both hands and head
On his knee— for that life he led!

The lordless man then ivakcs and finds
The fallow sea stripped by cold winds
184

LAND AND PEOPLE

With seabirds sousing in the spray.

And the hail and the snow seep down day by day.

Heavier are wounds then
For the sweet lord in his heart. And when
The sorrow of the thoughts of kin
Runs through his mind and searches in,

His heart goes to find them in the hall
The warriors of old strength.

As well as noble deeds the lord was expected to show
hberality, the long-lived ideal of the aristocrat scattering
gold among his people. Indeed no poetry, not even the
recent incantations of Edith Sitwell, is more laden with gold
than tluit of the Anglo-Saxons; it is made to shine on halls,
armour, weapons, in the robes of women and above all
falhng from the hand of the lord or king. Beowolf says of
the aged king Scyld Scefmg:

A man does well who gives, as he did there,

Treasures from his father' s store with open hand;

Then his dear company beside him yet,

When trouble comes, for him shall stand.

By deeds worth praise a man grows great
In every country.

Perhaps materialists will not understand this mixture of love,
loyalty and gold tliat bound the warrior band. The gold was
not taken for itself so much as for a symbol of liberalit) —
perhaps almost of fertility, the old gift of the king to his
people.

Tliis, at any rate, was the ideal of the bands who sailed
along the ‘whale’s path’ to turn a senile Roman Britain into
a raw young Saxon England. The warriors climbed into
their ship.

She went like a bird afloat with foamy neck
Pressed by the wind — till the due hour next day
When they saw Jrom the bent prow the hrim-clfis break
Out of the sea — the wide dunes, the stcepnip batiks.

185

A LAND

It was an important monient for the physical inheritance of
the present, for deciding the nature of the genes tliat each
generation might receive and transmit. The monient, too,
insured some quality in the culture of this land which has
left it neither Latin nor Teutonic.

It has not yet been clearly recalled how much of Roman
Britain was caught up into the life of die newcomers. How
far towns, land systems laws, and customs survived, or how
many of the Britons lived to mix immediately or at last
with their conquerors. For my purpose these obscurities of
memory arc not important. Undoubtedly even in the cast
much of the old population did survive and the women
from the very first were taken as wives. They were able
to influence the details of domestic life and teach something
of their native legends and ideals to their half-British
children. On the other hand, except where, as in Kent, the
Anglo-Saxons came at the invitation of the Britons, there
can have been no real continuity between the organized
life of the Roman Province and the instinctive life of the
barbarians. It w'as made impossible by the essential nature
of each.

The invasions were almost as incoherent, as empirical as
those of prehistoric times, and the invaders had to fit them-
selves into the land as they found it before they could begin,
without plan or intention, to remould it. In so doing,
inevitably they were drawn to the open and still cultivated
lands that encircled the decaying towns. But just as it made
little difference to the Britons whether they were struggling
to maintain disorganized lives in the comer of a forum or the
comer of a cave, so the Anglo-Saxons accepted the relics of
Roman civihzation as a natural if awe-inspiring feature of

1 86

LAND AND PEOPLE

their new land. (Perhaps this naive vision was the true in-
sight.)

Curious is this stonework I The Fates destroyed it;

The torn buildings falter; moulders the work of giants.

The roofs are tipped down, the turrets turn over,

The barred gate is broken, white lies on mortar

The frost, and open stands the arching, cumber of lumber

Eaten under with age. Earth has the Lord-Builders.

As the Saxon settlements consolidated and pushed west-
ward, resistance increased. The impetus of invasion was
slackening and the Britons themselves were recovering from
the helplessness of organized men whose organization had
collapsed. Their own instinctive life was reviving, and with
it martial loyalties more equal to opposing those of the
invaders. The symbol of this revival is King Arthur, whose
victories checked the advance long enough to ensure that in
what had been the heart of prehistoric Britain, the still
populous region of Wessex, there was time for more peace-
ful contact between the two peoples. When the advance
went forward again it was certain that the Britons, the living
inlieritance of the prehistoric past, woidd be absorbed by
their conquerors in sufficient force to leave their mark on
die western countryside. Their place names, although much
changed by passage across English tongues, have survived to
be fixed at last in the neat lettering and regular spelling of
the Ordnance Survey maps. The distinctive pattern of their
settlement, with its scattered hamlets and farms taking the
place of the snug villages of the Anglo-Saxons, still subdy
effects the landscape of our western counties.

If the tide of invasion was already weakening in England,
it was assured that furdier west and north the highlands

187

A LAND

would hold out against the Teutonic hordes as they had
against Roman intelligence. Cornishmen, Welsh and Scots
were destined to remain themselves, to enrich Britain
with their own art and literature, their own heroes, and to
send tlicir ablest children down from the hills to mingle
witli the lowland English, adding the mysticism, the courage
and toughness preserved or enlianccd by their native rocks.
The English might fight, curse and mock them, but within
the small compass of our land this constant descent of hill
people has meant as much as the infiltration of desert
nomads to the fertile lands of tlie East. It is in any case a
great advantage for any people to be able to heighten their
own character and consciousness by the fighting, cursing
and mocking of opponents whom they do not fear too
much.

Although the Anglo-Saxons settled at first along the open
river sides where they left their boats, and on the light soils
already cleared and cultivated, they soon began an assault
on the forests which w’as to alter the whole character of
the occupation of the land. It was a movement of popu-
lation almost as fiir-reaching as that brought about by
the Industrial Revolution a thousand years later. They
pushed up valleys, turning the bottoms into water meadows
and terracing the flanks with their long, narrow fields. Even
the great forests of the Midlands did not daunt diem; by the
eighth century the Saxons had cut the rich kingdom of
Mercia from land which liad long been hidden under a
dense covering of oak forest and tangled undergrowth. In
short they accelerated wnth all the energy of a young people
the shift from the light to heavy soils begun by the Belgae
and mildly continued by their descendants in Roman
Britain. It was a mo\’C destined to make an enormous

188

LAND AND PEOPLE

increase in the amount of food which men could raise from
the land.

The Danes and Norsemen made little difference to this
steady trend; their coming was a last upsurge of the instinc-
tive life of prehistoric times into the growing light of
Christian England. The Danes added some vigorous stock
to the peoples of eastern and nortliern England together
with many place names, a few country words and country
habits that still linger here and diere — as among the York-
shire dalesmen. The Norwegians occupied, and still occupy,
the Shctlands and Orkneys, and were the first to pene-
trate that mass of buckled rocks and volcanic flows which
wc now demurely call the Lake District. One important
influence tliey exercised on Britain was in the stimulus they
gave to the growth of towms. Not towns at all of the Roman
kind, for they had no urbanity, no formal civic dignity, but
were part of the organic growth of society, serving the
needs of the land, of the sea, and the commerce between
them.

By the time of the Domesday survey the shift of arable
farming to tlie heavy soils was almost complete; the uplands
were reverting to pasture and their small Celtic fields were
already hardly more than fiiint shadows on the tinf. Soon
they would be supporting the vast flocks of sheep that
brought wealth to medieval England.

Domesday Book, a name which has pressed its gloomy
sound into the mind of every schoolchild in Britain, is
another landmark in my narrative, another stage in the
creation of this country. I have recalled how a vague aware-
ness of the form and character of the island had grown in the
minds of its early inhabitants before it had been pinned down
by written names, given furdier precision by Greek map

189

A LAND

makers and a sharp though temporary clarity in the intellec-
tual concepts of Roman engineers, administrators and
generals. Now the islanders were themselves to record all the
leading facts of their material lives. Througliout the country
men were called together to declare the state of their com-
munities, their numbers and possessions in flocks and herds,
pigs, ploughs and plough teams. Each man described the
small realm formed by the illumined sphere of his owi per-
ceptions, beyond which all was shadowy. These many
lighted plots wx're amalgamated, their contents ordered and
carefully inscribed on vellum. For the first time a moment
in the material life of England had been so caught and fixed
by written wa')rds that it could be mastered by a single mind.

Domesday Book is a symbol of what is for my purpose
the most significant result of the Norman conquest. This
was the gathering of the people of England into a nation, a
plant with as many roots in the land as there w^re people,
and a structure dependent on obligations and loyalties
bctwx'cn individuals, die wdiole growing round the sacred
and secular powers of the king.

Although the mountains were still an effective barrier pro-
tecting their own forms of life and thought, England had
achieved a new unity. There was less intellectual coherence
than in Roman times, no one thought of road systems or
planned improvements; in spite of the survey there were
probably far fewer people either able or inclined to think for
the land as a wiiole. Yet as a living organism it was incom-
parably stronger, just as a regiment is stronger than a
Ministry of Defence.

Domesday Book is a moving revelation of the conserva-
tism of our countryside. Setting aside industrial encrustations,
men arc Hving where they hved nine centuries ago; south

190

LAND AND PEOPLE

of the Humber our villages, parishes, boroughs and counties
had in large part been established before the Conquest. Any
countryman who goes to consult the heavy volumes in the
Record Office can expect to find the name of his village
written there.

It is this immense antiquity that gives our land its look of
confidence and peace, its power to give both rest and
inspiration. When retuniing from hill or moor one looks
down on a village, one’s destination, swaddled in trees, and
with only the church tower breaking the thin blue layer of
evening smoke, the emotion it provokes is as precious as it
may be commonplace. Time, that has caressed this place
until it lies as comfortably as a favourite cat in an armchair,
caresses also even the least imaginative of beholders.

Every individual clings to the memories and relics of his
own youth, and it may be that as a people we are no less
dependent on our past, and even on its material remains. We
may need to see that within the unceasing process in which
wc arc involved there remains this continuity, this possibility
of rest. If wx' ignore it, break with and forget our past, then
perhaps we shall all become the landless refugees of whom
already an Anglo-Saxon poet said:

The refugee is hated everywhere
For his misery^

Building in stone masonry went out with the Romans,
and although the later Saxons revived it, their energy was
too scattered, too little organized, to enable diem to quarry
and build on a massive scale. The Normans brought that
combination of a strong faith with the concentration of
power in a few hands that enables a nation to create its
boldest monuments. As Christians and lately pagan warriors

191

A LAND

they devoted this exceptional force to castles, and (far the
greater part of it) to cathedrals, abbeys and parish churches.
All over tlie coimtry buildings went up in a bulk and quan-
tity jievcr before known, and with a quality that Christian
faith had alone made possible.

At strategic points throughout the kingdom, earth was
raised into castle mounds and keeps were built upon them ;
the Conqueror’s own White Tower still stands near the
heart of London as an example of all such building. Until
the coming of mechanical diggers, tlie mounds were almost
indestructible and scores still survive where die keep has
gone. Easily the least dull of the Cambridge walks on which
I was conducted by my nurse was to Castle Hill ; we would
edge cautiously through the yard of the police station and
dien scramble up the tussocky grass of this big pudding of
earth that seemed so incongruous among the surrounding
brick. From the top I could sec my house a long way off
(always an exciting experience, and perhaps in fict die
subject of diis book) and I liked to imagine this place when,
as I innocently supposed, it had looked like the painting on
the sign of the nearby Castle public-house. Haifa mile away
I could sec die conical roof of the Round Church and
pictured men-at-arms riding to it across the bridge. As for
Norman church building, it is impossible to say whether the
vast number of little country churches or the great cathedrals
make most fitting monuments to the extraordinary energy
released by the Conquest. Most of our village churches can
show at least a small window or a blocked nordi door to
prove that some part of their fabric was raised in Norman
times. No building in Britain is more impressive than
Durham Cathedral or has involved die raising of a greater
weight of stone. Any spectator seeing it when all memory

192

LAND AND PEOPLE

of its origins had gone would have had more reason than
the Saxon poet at Bath for believing that this was the work
of giants, that no puny men would have raised the gigantic
columns of the vast, empty nave.

There were never more than a few million people in
medieval Britain, yet their building still dominates the
wliolc land. Even in our industrial cities it is usually the
medieval buildings that rise above the rest, with an aloof-
ness, sometimes solemn, sometimes airily elegant, setting
them apart from the surrounding commerce. We have as
yet created nothing quite comparable with the scene in
Wall Street where the black cliffs of the skyscrapers so
dwarf St. John the Divine that it looks like a church fetched
from Lilli put.

As the last considerable addition to our racial stock, the
Normans seem for a time to have introduced a round-
headedness that was however soon absorbed in the flow of
our prehistoric and Saxon inheritance. It was otherwise with
their language, for while Norman French, too, was ab-
sorbed, it certainly did not disappear but changed the colour
of the English language. Temporarily it added to an English
babel. While the conquerors welded England into a single
strong state, even outside the Celtic-speaking lands, every
region, almost every county, had its own dialect. Langland
wrote in the once pre-emiircnt dialect of the west Midlands,
but Chaucer (in whom the spirit of the later Middle Ages
lives as the material world of the earlier phase lives in
Domesday Book) did much to strengthen the courtly
language of London. When Caxton built his press at West-
minster, he saw, with astonishing good sense and foresight,
how much his little leaden letters must do to fix down the
English tongue, and it w^'as with careful deliberation that he
N 193

A LAND

favoured tlie more polished, the more European forms of
London. Soon, too, presses were being used for maps that
for the first time forced the form of Britain into the con-
sciousness of her people. The eager Tudor nation wanted a
portrait of the land of which it was becoming consciously
proud: the Queen herself saw the significance of the idea that
her wide lands should be drawn into a book. That is why a
lion and a dragon support the Tudor arms on every map in
the splendid Atlas of England and Wales that Christopher
Saxton completed in 1579. Shakespeare, when he wrote
King Henry’s speech, would have had in his mind the
images of many brightly coloured maps in which our coasts
showed against a rippling sea. At the same time it was
natural that the most sensitive minds also wanted to know
and interpret the monuments of the country whose image,
whose form, was becoming clearer and clearer before them.
So die antiquaries began dieir journeys and their records;
William Camden, the friend of Philip Sidney, published his
Britannia in 1586. Here was the beginning of diat quickening
quest of the consciousness for its o\vii origins of which I
have already written and on behalf of which I write.

Behind this growing clarity of the intellect die taming of
the country — forest clearance and the reclaiming of ivaste —
went forward as it had begun in Saxon times. When die
Middle Ages came to an end few large tracts of primeval
England remained. There were still substantial patches of
woodland — the New Forest, Sherwood, Selwood, the
Forests of Dean, Andred, Windsor, Epping and Arden,
there were the reedy swamps of the East Anglian fens, but
elsewhere outside the mountain regions most of the
countryside had been modelled by man and was in daily
use. The hedges, now so dear to English sentiment, gradu-

194

LAND AND PEOPLE

ally spread their lines as common waste and coppice and the
open fields of the medieval villages were enclosed. At the
same time men were being released from a system which
saw them not as creatures of the land, as they arc, but as
creatures bound by law to one plot, part of its equipment,
and largely at the disposal of their landlords. The new sys-
tem, by putting more energy into the working of large
firms and estates, certainly made the countryside more
comely, even while it weakened the structure of human
society. It was the necessary preparation for the pride of
high farming in the eighteenth century.

By Tudor times a country that had once been choked with
trees was growing short of timber. How many tens of
thousands of trunks had crashed down since a Mesolithic
hunter first applied a flint axe? Oak was needed for the fine
half-timbered houses of the merchants and for their ships.
Much fuel W'as needed for the smelting of iron. Already in
some regions the shortage w^as so severe that families were
deprived of the fire on the hearth tliat had burned without
thought or question since the beginning of human liistory.
The Romans had used coal, and during the Middle Ages it
had been burnt in London and in other places where it could
readily be shipped from Durham and Tyneside. Now, how-
ever, with their own forests dissipated, Englishmen began
to plunder the Carboniferous forests with a necessary
vigour. They pursued those narrow black bands in the shale
that had already been laid down, crumpled up and partially
worn away before the appearance of the first mammals.
Tudor builders were much employed in adapting fireplaces
and chimneys to the fierce new fuel; in Sussex the forges of
the Weald were turning out their handsome iron fircbacks.
Coal, once easily to be had on the surface, was followed

195

A LAND

deeper and deeper underground. By the seventeenth century
men were workijig four hundred feet dowi, tliis being the
earliest occasion on which die surface of the earth had
anywhere been so outraged by the creatures it had borne.
Cut oft from the land and its cultivation and from their
fellows, labouring in primitive timncls where often they
were destroyed by explosions of gas, the miners became the
first considerable industrial population. Gold and silver,
those naturally sacred metals, wxre the property of the
Crowm, but otherwise it was assumed that the owner of the
land surface also owned everything that lay below it, down
(one supposes) to a narrow’ point at the centre of the globe.
So it w\as that landow’ners became coalowners and very rich
men. For better, for worse, fortunes came to them, and
certainly much of the pow’cr wdiich they drew- from be-
low ground wms directed towards enriching its surface,
towards creating noble houses and parks. In its early days,
coal could serve as the manure of beauty. It wtis not un-
suitable that a tax should have been levied on it to rebuild
St. Paul’s.

Iron-working increased with coal-mining, but it was not
until the eighteenth century that the two were to be brought
together. Iron wms still smelted with charcoal and the fur-
naces w'erc fast devouring the surviving forests. In particular
Birmingham w^as developing the activity that in time was to
send fragments of England to every quarter of the globe,
worked into every imaginable useful object or useless
knick-knack. Before the end of the seventeenth century
Birmingham had devoured the Forest of Arden. The virgin
ground north-west of the Avon on which it had stood made
magnificent corn lands, but the ‘poor dappled fools’ were
killed or scattered and with them and their deep w^oods,

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LAND AND PEOPLE

here and throughout the country, there perhaps vanished one
of the sources from 'which poetry had sprung.

Beliind this innovation, this new relationship that allowed
large numbers of men to plunder the land and no longer to
seek its fertility, a change in the direction of huinan con-
sciousness was gathering momentum. The Christianity of
the Middle Ages had been a means for reuniting con-
sciousness with its surroundings. It had fostered an intuitive
life where inind still drew much from its deepest levels and
saw the whole material world as the symbols of a reality
of which it was a part. For the peasantry Mary and the
resurrected Christ had again enthroned the Great Mother.

Through the Renaissance something returned that had left
Britain with the Romans: it returned not as an alien
imposition as it had been then, but as an active principle
accepted in the minds of a lusty young nation. The in tellect
sharpened its knife. Jehovah overcame Mary and Christ; a
divine king of the peasantry was beheaded; witches were
hunted and maypoles with other fertility rites were des-
troyed; a classical St. PauFs rose on the foundations of the
Gothic catliedral; Newton saw the apple fall.

So Britain sailed into the ciglitcenth century, the last
flame of the old ideas was extinguished with Bonnie Prince
Charlie, and for a moment it seemed that the intellect could
rule, and that the ncAV relationship to the land could enrich
and not harm the old. Crabbe may have felt that the cares
that ‘form the real picture of the poor, Demand a song’ but
there is no knowing what he would feel was demanded by
the back streets of Liverpool, or Oxford Street on a hot
afternoon.

Only the most prejudiced can deny that the eighteenth
century, and especially the reign of Queen Anne, was for all

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A LAND

classes one of die best times to have been alive in this
country. It is idiocy to pretend that to live in a lovely
countryside, to handle only comely things, and to know
that only comely things will issue from your hands is of
no importance when set beside the amount of cash in your
purse.

It was a good time, for reason was still living on the
fertihty of the Great Goddess, the Whig aristocracy on the
loyalties of feudalism. Somewhere under the feet of diese
aristocrats as they carefully cultivated the aesthetic qualities
of landscape the miners were driving tlieir tunnels, while in
Georgian back rooms Watt, Arkwright, and their fellows
wxre working on the prototypes for the macliine age.

CHAPTER IX

Land and Machines

M any landmarks have been recorded dur-
ing the course of these memoirs, but now the
Industrial Revolution appears not as a mark
on a continuous road, but an abrupt turning-
point. For an incalculably great length of time men had been
relating themselves more and more closely and effectively
to the land. For the past four or five thousand years they had
laboured as farmers, clearing the forests, reclaiming waste
and swamp, hedging and ditching. The struggle of two
hundred generations of cultivators had its culmination in the
high firming of the eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies. Now those thousands of years of wooing fertility
under the sun and rain were to be half forgotten in a third
way of living which resembles the first, that of the hunters,
in its predatory dependence on the natural resources of the
country.

From this time the pattern of settlement was no longer to
be decided by the character of the soil, the surface features of
the land and the climate, but by the distribution of the
deposits wliich time had left far below the surface. Huge
numbers left farms and villages and swarmed to the places
where coal and metal ores lay hidden; once there they
showed an extraordinary fecundity. The population doubled
and doubled again. By the middle of the nineteenth century
half the people of Britain were living in tovms, a situation
new in the history of great nations.

Those town-dwellers, cut off from the soil and from food

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A LAND

production, soon lost all those arts and skills which had
always been the possession if not of every man, then of
every small community. The sons and dauglners of the first
generation of town dwellers were not tauglit how to use eye
and hand in the traditional skills, and, a loss of absolute
finality, they could not inherit all the traditional forms, the
shape for an axe handle, a yoke, for a pair of tongs; the
proportions of cottage doors and windows, the designs for
smocking, lace-making, embroidery. Some of these forms,
because they had achieved fitness for their purpose as com-
plete as the unchanging bodies of the insects, had remained
constant for centuries or millennia, others w'cre always
evolving yet maintained their continuity. Now all of them,
or almost all, were to fade from the common imaeination,
to become extinct. I know of only one traditional form for
an everyday tool which has been adapted w'ithout loss to
machine production; this is the exejuisitely curved and
modulated handle of the w'ood-cuttcr’s axe.

With the extinction of ancient arts and skills there went
also countless local rites, customs, legends and liist(’)rics. All
these, wdicther or no they had been adapted to the Christian
myth, were survivals of a paganism that helped to unite
country people wnth nature and their own ancestors. Stories
and names for fields and lanes recalled men and women who
had worked the land before them ; legends still commem-
orated local deities who had lived in wood, water and stone;
many customs recognized and assisted in the main crises of
individual lives; rites helped to harmonize these individual
rhythms with the greater rhythms of nature — they cele-
brated the return of the sun, the resurrection of the corn,
harvest, and the return of death.

Without these immemorial tics, personal and universal,

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LAND AND MACmNES

relating men to their surroundings in time and space, the
isolation of human consciousness by urban life was a most
violent challenge. It gave opportunity for the heightening
of consciousness and the sharpening of intellect, but human
weakness and material circumstances made it impossible for
any but the few gifted or fortunate to respond. The urban
masses ha ving lost all the traditions I have just named which
together make up the inheritance which may be called cul-
ture, tended to become, as individuals, culturcless. Tlie women
were in better case, for all except the most down-trodden
could rear children, clean, launder, sew and cook after a
fashion, though all their work was dulled and robbed of
distinction by the standardization and poor quality of their
materials. (It is one of the more bizarre results of industrial-
ism that the rich will now pay great sums to obtain goods
that were once taken for granted by quite humble people.
Such things as real honey, fresh butter and eggs, hand
needlework, tiles made of real stone, reed thatch.) For the
men it was far worse. Usually they could do only one thing;
and that without direct relation to their own lives; when
they returned from the set hours of ‘work* there was noth-
ing for hand or imagination to do. So, wdien at last leisure
was won for them, it proved to be a barren gift.

I do not wish to suggest that there was any lessening of
man’s dependence on the land, of his struggle to extract a
living from it; that is the stuff of existence and cannc:)t be
reduced. It is not true either that industry is lacking in its
own bold regional variations ; the collieries with hoists and
slag heaps, the steel furnaces, the clustering chimneys of the
brick kilns, the potteries, all create their own landscape. But
the individual life, the individual culture, was not sensi-
tively adjusted to locality and the nature of the relationship

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A LAND

was profoundly changed. It ceased to be creative, a patient
and increasingly skilful love-making that had persuaded the
land to flourish, and became destructive, a grabbing of
material for man to destroy or to refashion to his own
design. The intrusion of machines between hand and
material completed the estrangement.

By this new rapacious treatment of the land man cer-
tainly made himself abundantly productive of material
goods. But he cannot be sure of getting wliat he wants from
the great cauldron of production. Meanwliile the land, with
which he must always comitiue to livt\ shows in its ravaged face
that husbandry has been succeeded by exploitation — an
exploitation designed to satisfy man’s vanity, his greed and
possessiveness, his wisii for domination.

As a starting-point for the Revolution I shall choose the
time about two hundred years ago, when men began to
smelt iron with coke. Earlier attempts to use coal instead of
wood had Exiled, but now, largely througli the efforts of
generations of one Exmily, the Darbys of Shropshire, the
new process was mastered and the coal-and-iron age of
Victorian England was already within sight. It is, of course,
possible to say that the real revolution, the tipping of the
balance from agriculture to manufacture, took place later
than tliis. Equally, or indeed with more justification, it can
be claimed that it began much earlier with Tudor com-
merce and the scientific ferment of the seventeenth century.
I would agree, I w’^ould even wnllingly push it back to die
depths of the Carboniferous forests; there is never a begin-
ning. But I prefer to select the mating of coal and iron, for
with the thought of it the weight and grime of the Black
Country, the bustle and energy of material activity, at once
take shape in the imagination. Besides, it was a time when

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LAND AND MACHINES

die intellect, sharpened by the new scientific, analytical
modes of thought, was achieving many other of the devices
that made industrialism possible. In one year, 1769, Ark-
wright gave the water frame to the cotton industry and
Watt patented the steam-engine. Within another ten years
the gorge of the Severn which had been cut in the Ice Age
by the overflowing waters of Lake Lapworth was spanned
by the first iron bridge to be built in the world. Together
these closely consecutive events well represent the new
forces of the Revolution ; coal and iron, mechanical power,
mechanization and the corresponding development of
transport.

The Industrial Revolution was certainly in part brought
about by the scientific mode of thought that had grown from
the Renaissance intellect. Yet it was not itself a rational
episode. To me it seems an upsurge of instinctive forces com-
parable to the barbarian invasions, a surge that destroyed
eighteen th-century civilization much as the Anglo-Saxons
destroyed that of Roman Britain. No one planned it, no
one foresaw more than a tittle of the consequences, very few
people s.iid that they wanted it, but once begun the impetus
was irresistible; more and more individual lives became
helplessly involved, drawn into the vortex. It went forward
as irresistibly as the evolution of the dinosaurs and in it was
included the roaring of Tyrannosaurus. It seems indeed that
Tyrannosaurus and Apollo of the Intellect worked together
for the Revolution and no combination could be more
powerful or more dangerous.

It lent to its instruments an astonishing strength. It
enabled this chip of the earth’s surface, the small fund of
human mind, will and energy that it supported, momen-
tarily to dominate the whole surface of the planet and in so

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A LAND

doing, like a gigantic, slow explosion, to disperse fragments
of itself all over that surf ice. It seems possible that had there
not been this association of coal and iron, growing popula-
tion and intellectual ferment within the bounds of a temper-
ate island, the industrialization that in two centuries has
totally cliangcd human life might never have assumed its
present forms.

They were there, and the new way of life developed with
a speed that is almost unbelievable when it is compared with
any other experience of human history. In South Wales,
South Yorkshire and Tyneside, all those regions where past
events liad left iron and coal in close proximity, there sprang
up foundries whose crimson glare by night repeats some-
thing of the volcanic furies of other ages. With them there
grew to colossal stature the manufictiire of metal goods, a
manufacture centred on Birmingham in a region that had
remained longer than almost any other under the peaceful
covering of tlic forests. On the moist westcni side of the
Pennines the cotton industry, the first to be wholly depen-
dent on material produced outside tlic island, grew up in
obscene relationship with the trade in African slaves. The
little mills once turned by the Pennine streams, family
cottage mamificturc, wxrc soon abandoned for the factories
of Manchester and the neighbouring towns that were grow-
ing round it. Away on the east of the central mountains, the
ancient conservatism of the wool trade long resisted the new
methods; in time, however, first spinning and then weaving
left the rural valleys and moved to towns like Bradford,
where the foamy white wool is combed and spun in mills of
blackened rock, and to Leeds and Huddersfield, where it is
woven on looms whose descent from those of the Bronze
Age it is hard to credit. The salt that the evaporation of the

204

LAND AND MACHINES

Triassic lakes and lagoons had left under the Cheshire
plain became the source of a chemical industry, a thing new
even among so much innovation. One other industry there
was which I will mention because it shows liow, exception-
ally, a few individuals may impose themselves on the land,
creating something from their own wills that is not dictated
by circumstances. There was no material reason beyond a
supply of coal for his furnaces why Josiah Wedgwood and
his family should have built up the pottery business in
Staffordshire. Much of his material was dug in Cornwall
(where the glistening white heaps of kaolin look so alien,
so improbable among the soft, warmly coloured granite
moorlands), and his kilns were inconveniently far from the
coast for the carriage of both the raw clay and the finished
china. However, Wedgwood lived there and started liis
work there and so the existence of the Five Towns was
determined. The craft that even in Britain had a history of
four and a half millennia now W’^ent into mass production
largely through the inspiration of one man. It was appro-
priate that for a time his name was identified with that of the
clay he manipulated — that ‘common Wedgwood’ should
become the accepted term for the people’s crockery.
Because of their liistory, the Potteries have remained more
patriarchal in organization, more personal in feeling than
other industries, just as from its nature the work itself
remains exceptionally individual and unmcchanizcd. I will
not leave the Potteries without commenting on the extra-
ordinary forethought that nature seems to me to have shown
in the formation of kaolin; nearly two hundred million years
after its deposition, it has proved that this substance can be used
for making china, for fulling cloth, for keeping the shine from
women’s faces, for paper-making and as a cure for diarrhoea.

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A LAND

Transport was of course one of the keys of industrialism.
Upon it depended a state of affairs in which men no longer
made things for local use and in which a locahty no longer
provided the food for its people. By the eighteenth century
Britain was more closely unified by roads than it had been
since Roman times and soon tliis was reinforced by the
canals, a quiet, deliberate form of carriage that came to
have its owai nomadic population. Then down the ringing
grooves of change came the railw\ay engine begotten by
Watt and Stephenson on the iron-and-coal age. Gangs of
navvies were moved about the coimtry embanking, cutting,
tunnelling, bridge-building; thousands of tons of metal were
laid across our meadows, along our valleys, round our coasts.
The incidental result of tliis activity in stimulating conscious-
ness in its search for its origins has already been demon-
strated ill the life of William Smith, die Father of Strati-
graphy.

The shift in population W’as the fourth and infinitely the
greatest that had taken place since Mesolithic times. The
north of England and southern Wales, formerly rather
thinly settled, soon had the bulk of a sharply rising popula-
tion. As mills, factories, foundries and kilns multiplied, the
little streets of die workers’ houses spread their lines over
hills that belonged to w ild birds and mountain sheep, and up
valleys where dierc was nothing busier than a rushing beck.
Without intention or understanding the greater part of the
peopleof Britain found themselves living in towns, uprooted,
and in a strange, unstable environment. The growths of
brick and stone, later of concrete, whose ragged outer edges
were always creeping further might coalesce one wdth
another in urban areas so large that it was difficult for the
inhabitants to set foot on grass or naked earth. The results

206

LAND AND MACHINES

were grini, but sometimes and particularly in the Pennine
towns tliey had their own grandeur. Where houses and fac-
tories are still built from the local rocks and where straight
streets climb uncomprisingly up hillsides, their roofs step-
ping up and up against the sky, they have a geometric
beauty that is harsh but true, while the texture of smoke-
blackened lime- or sandstone can be curiously soft and rich,
hkc the wings of some of our sombre night-flying moths.
Nor do such cities ever quite lose the modelling of their
natural foundations. On my first visit to the industrial north
I rode on the top of a tram all the way from Leeds to Batley
and all the way I rode through urban streets. In the last day-
light it seemed a melancholy and formless jumble of brick
and stone, but as darkness closed and a few smoky stars
soothed and extended my thoughts, the lamps going up in
innumerable little houses restored the contours of hill and
dale in shimmering lines of light.

At least much of tliis nineteenth-century building showed
the force, the ruthless purpose of its age. The railways, too,
served to concentrate it and to keep it truly urban. Far more
pitiful arc the housing estates, the ribbon development and
all the flimsy scattered new building that our own century
has added as a result of the internal combustion engine. The
railways took far too many people to certain places, the
motor-car takes rather too many people everywhere. The
dormitory housing estates on the outskirts of cities are a
limbo created by the combination of meanness with theor-
etical good intentions. The Httle gardens that man’s incur-
able love of earth has obliged the council or the speculative
builder to provide, soon make a ragged wilderness of
broken fences and sheds. The streets wander aimlessly about,
representing either simple chaos or the whimsy notions of a

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A LAND

planning officer. Nothing has grown; nothing is inevitable.
All over England the houses are the same; for they are built
of materials that are not local but cheap. A house at Brad-
ford, a house at Dagenham, will show the same silly stucco,
the same paltry composition roof. Since 1945 there has been
an ijiiprovcmcnt, and the sight of these better houses, flats,
schools, is the most hopeful thing to be seen in Britain, more
convincing than ten million optimistic words. It is the only
thing that suggests that new roots are going down and new
sources of vitality being found.

Perhaps what is worst in the effects of motor transport and
of the partial shift of the balance of population back to the
s<.aith and the southern Midlands, has been the wreckage left
in its wake. When the uplands so thickly peopled in pre-
historic times were deserted, the scars that human activity
had left upon them were so slight, so readily healed, that
soon they melted back into the scene and enriched it. The
gentle knolls of chieftains’ graves adorn the horizon, fortress
walls become grass banks for lovers’ meetings. But once men
had taken to using chemical change on an immense scale to
convert the natural substances of the land for their own pur-
poses, this natural healing could hardly again take place. Iron
and concrete arc not readily softened. A robin may nest in a
rusty kettle but that is about the largest scale on w^hich adapta-
tion is possible. The present derelict parts of industrial Britain
assume a degraded ugliness never before known. Who can
ever express the desolation of these forlorn scenes? The
grey slag heap, the acres of land littered with rusted frag-
ments of machinery, splintered glass, tin cans, sagging
festoons of barbed wire; vile buildings, more vile in ruin;
grimy stretches of cement floors, shapeless heaps of broken
concrete. The air about them still so foul that nothing more

208

An expression of Arl.nuK eo.ist scenery by Ben Nschi

IM A 1 1 \1\

LAND AND MACHINES

than a few nettles and tattered thistles will grow there; not
even rosebay and ragwort can hide them with a brief mid-
summer promise. This is the worst that has happened to the
land.

One curious result of the Industrial Revolution can claim
a special place in this chronicle of the relationship between
men and their land. For the medieval peasant eight weeks
in the year were holy days, days when a service in the parish
church was followed by freedom for rest and celebration.
Each chosen black- and red-letter day, each Church festival,
was a part of the wheel of the year and served for rites so
inucli more ancient than Christianity as to be almost as old
as the consciousness of man. No countryman could have
celebrated tlicm away from his own cottage, fields and
animals, his neighbours <tnd his church, for they were impor-
tant tlireads in tlie fabric of life where all these things were
woven together in a single design.

Now die sharp division of work from play and the
natural from the supernatural has turned holy days into
liolidays, and the compelling restlessness and ugliness of
towns has made holidays an occasion for escape from home.
So there is this new form of mass migration — no longer to
pursue game animals or pasture domestic ones, no longer for
fishing or fowling or the visiting of shrines. Instead a flight
from a man-made world too hard, dirty and hideous to
allow its inhabitants to rest, to lie down on the groimd or to
dance upon it, to turn back to their surroundings for refresh-
ment. Three hundred years ago how impossible it would
have seemed that England should be cumbered widi towns
built as an escape from towns, that half its south and east
coasts should be encrusted with red bricks, walled behind
concrete, the sea itself grasped after with iron piers. If the
o 209

A LAND

migrations have largely defeated their purpose by spreading
more hardness and a new ugliness, at least die resorts arc
clean, and human beings can find just room enough to
stretch their bodies on the sand.

Elsewhere in the country, as has already appeared, crowds
make for wide views, for wild country, for unusually
dynamic manifestations of nature or ancient manifestation
of man, feeding themselves w'hilc they may on something
which they most urgently need, some nourishment quite
lacking in urban existence.

Where did all the men and women come from to fill the
towns of the Revolution? What was the cause of the endless
fecundity that lent it impetus? I read that it was due to
improvements in medicine, to a drop in the death rate. I
cannot believe it. Instead I believe that just as die audience in
a theatre can become a single being responding as one
consciousness to the emotions of the play, so a whole people
can be caught up and respond to some drama of which it is
aware in its own life. However, it happened, this prostitution
of the Great Goddess to die industry that was her bane,
wombs conceived, death fought a losing battle and the
towns, the factories and the mines w^ere filled, the railways
and the ships wx're manned.

At first the cultivation of the soil almost kept pace with
this multiplication of mouths. The enclosure of the old open
fields so long delayed in all the Midland shires w-'as rushed
ahead ; the hedges imposed their rectangles on strip fields that
had been cultivated for a thousand years, and the last of the
peasants, with their poor husbandry and tenacious love of the
soil, were dissolved, scattering readily among the big farms
and estates and into the towns. As Artliur Young saw before
the end of the eighteenth century; ‘A country fellow, one

210

LAND AND MACIDNES

hundred miles from London, jumps on a coach box in the
morning, and for eight or ten sliillings gets to town by
night . . . and of course ten times the boasts arc sounded in
the cars of country fools to induce them to quit their healthy
clean fields for a region of dirt, stink and noise/ Soon a
country fellow could jump onto a railway train even more
cheaply and then all was decided.

Under die big landlords and tenant fiirmcrs the land was
splendidly cultivated. Country mansions, dignified farms
w’^ent up, modest farmsteads w^cre enlarged; w'calth coming
from industry flowed into the land. A few great improvers
like Thomas Coke of Holkliam transformed English
agriculture. Through tlieir enterprise simple equipment that
had been good enough since the Iron Age was thrown aside;
the weight of sheep was doubled; men had never dreamt
that cows could yield so much milk. Above all the more
skilful handling of grass and the cultivation of roots ended
the great autumn slaughter of livestock that had been a
necessity since the Stone Age. So great was the increase in
cultivation that the conscious lovers of a more natural
countryside could even lament it. Matthew Arnold wrote of
the change in the Oxford coimtryside that had taken place
since his youtli:

I know these slopes; who knows them if not I ? —

But many a dingle on the loved hillside.

With thorns once studded, old, white-hlossomed trees.

Where thick the cowslips grew, and, far descried.

High tower d the spikes of purple orchises.

Hath since our day put by
The coronals of that forgotten time,

Down each green bank hath gone the ploughhoy s team.

And only in the hidden brookside gleam
Primroses, orphans of the flowery prime,

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A LAND

What would this liigh soul have said could he have seen
Lord Nuffield following in the ploughboy’s furrow?

Coke’s column at Holkham stands as a monument to
these days of high firming. Surrounded by a park that is still
a proof of the creative force possible in a single man, and
witli a village that keeps a few lingering memories of
feudalism, this monument looks from far off like a miUtary
trophy. But a closer view shows that on the corners where
one expects cannon, tlicre are sheep, cattle, a plough and a
seeding machine; the low reliefs on the walls show not
battle but agricultural scenes, wlhle on the top of the column
the object that might have been a hero in uniform proves to
be an imposing sheaf of corn.

But even the new fecundity of the land could not hope to
keep pace with that of the new labouring classes. If I have
arbitrarily chosen the smelting of iron with coke as marking
the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, I will for the
purpose of these memoirs choose the time when the country
ceased to produce enough food nearly to feed its people as
representing its crisis. From that time Britain forfeited the
reality of its life as an island, the meaning of the outline that
its coasts drew upon the sea. From that time it must always
sell overseas not only to be prosperous but to live; it could
never retreat into itself to recuperate its powers. The little
trade in the tilings of luxury and privilege that had begun in
the Bronze Age had grown to this circulation of the life
blood through a score of huge ports.

Yet for the first half of the reign of Victoria, the bringing
in of foreign grain did not damage native cultivation. The
two Britains flourished side by side, the swarming cities with
their new relationships between rich and poor, and a
sparsely populated but well-farmed countryside with its

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LAND AND MACHINES

great houses, its country towns and its whole aristocratic
structure little changed since the eighteenth century. This
countryside, too, could still inspire and maintain its painters
— Cornelius Varley, Cox, dc Wint, men of tlic second
rank, but all still turning out charming water colours
of rural England and Wales round the middle of the
century.

In reality dangers were already massing against this pros-
perous world. There were, of course, the material forces;
the American pioneers ready to tear the heart out of the
prairies for quick gold, and with railways and trans-
atlantic steamships at their command. But even more
dangerous, perhaps, w^as the weakening of resistance from
within. The centre of gravity of English life had shifted very
far towards the cities; the land was defended by no deeply
rooted peasantry and its cultivation had become a way of
making money rather than of living. This in turn w’^as no
more than one aspect of a pervading materialism — let me
represent it by saying that for men their ancient symbol of
gold no longer had any hint of the sun or of harvest about
it, but only of material wealth. Moreover, there reigned in
many places a faith in the new^ deity of Progress that helped
to make men blind to all that wms evil, or dangerous, in
change.

In the end it took no more than a few bad harvests in
the seventies to open the gates. American grain poured in,
the future dust bowds w^ere prepared and all the centuries of
the loving husbandry of the land of Britain betrayed. The
Great Goddess was seen in her aspect of Cinderella, with
soot in her hair and dust on her skirt; those who under-
stood her, however, did not doubt that she would wait for
retribution.

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It is no part of the intention of this book to pass judge-
ments. I applauded the appearance of the trilobitcs ; I did not
deplore the fall of the dinosaurs ; I freely accepted the pro-
gressive virtues of the placenta and even beyond that
mammalian tour de force have been almost equally acquiescent.
This has been due not to a Victorian confidence in pro-
gress, but to the fact that my intention was no more than to
celebrate the creation of Britain and in so doing tacitly to
express a love for the result. If, then, w^ords of judgement
begin to appear in this chapter, it is only because my
narrative has now reached a point beyond that of the recol-
lections of a general consciousness to one where my own
moment of consciousness is touclied upon. The following
words, in short, must be read not as an expression of the
purpose of the book, but simply as inurmurings representa-
tive of a consciousness subjected to the conditions of the
year a.d. 1949.

Seeing the Industrial Revolution as something compar-
able to a barbarian invasion, I assume that, as after other
incursions of violent intuitive forces, it must be followed by
a civilizing period — that energy must now be subject to
control. I assume, too, that State Socialism has come in
response to this need, to impose form and order on the wan-
ing exuberance of revolution. But whereas, for example,
after die Anglo-Saxon invasions the Christian Church
succeeded in slowly civilizing each individual and small
community from within so diat all became part of a
vigorous, organic, but unselfconscious nation, the present
State seems in many ways to come closer to the Roman
pattern. Although the controlling intellects are not those of
foreigners, and Britain is not a remote province of a great
empire but very much a nation, yet there is the similarity of

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LAND AND MACHINBS

deliberate intellectual control from a distant centre, the
imposition of plans alien to the local community. The
reasons for such control arc totally different. Industrializa-
tion had so crushed the culture of the individuals composing
urban masses that die necessary form and order could only
be imposed. Yet as a result we have an urban culture which
is in a sense highly complex, yet is not creatively embodied
in the people themselves. Everything is supplied for them
from outside, whether by the State, the merchant or the
purveyor of entertainment. The individual, especially
the man, docs not possess culture, cannot express it, but
merely receives a doubtful mixture in a spoon, paid for
from his purse. The greater the improvement in
material conditions the more complete this passivity
becomes.

It may be that the centralized State represents the logical
perfection of die growing selfconsciousness of the land
which I have followed by such steps as Domesday Book and
Saxton’s maps and the unification of the English language.
To-day the State has catalogued every man, woman and
child within our coasts, has mapped every foot of the
ground. Not only is there a unified language, but one voice
can unite the consciousness of listeners from end to end and
side to side of the island ; one film can be seen in a hundred
towns at once ; identical tins arc opened in every county of
Britain.

When underneath all this, culture is no longer sufficiently
embodied in each individual, the contrasting delights of
locality, the poetry of a people delicately adjusted to varied
surroundings, finding their new but always fitting responses,
must blur into a grey uniformity. Men, and to a lesser
extent women, are living in tlie topmost attics of the mind

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A LAND

receiving instruction and information. They are cut off from
the nourishment of the past both physically and in the
depths of their own minds where the images of experience
have formed in darkness since the first stir of life in pre-
Cambrian seas. So, too, they arc cut off from tliese deep
sources of creative force, and ugliness pours from them,
flooding the lowlands, seeping more slowly among the
moors and mountains.

It may be the logical development, but like many other
evolutionary trends already chronicled, this one has gone
too far.

If in some ways the State has far exceeded what is desir-
able in the imposition of conscious order on the chaos of the
Revolution, in others it has failed utterly in the necessary
task of civilization. No intellect in command of power has
stood back far enough to judge the upshot of this blind
surge of energy, selecting what is hopeful for slow develop-
ment, condcnuiing what is abominable for gradual elimina-
tion. Too many of the conditions of life which it imposed
without their being anyone’s intention or wish, have been
accepted as inevitable. This is because its basic value has been
accepted, a materialism which has been exposed in all
nakedness now that the energy and pioneering enthusiasms
which inspired it have died away. Once men were con-
cerned with the quality of hfe as a whole and with their
relation to the universe; they could assume, for example,
that the ritual and revelry of the Twelve Days of Christmas
were of infinitely greater value than the small material gain
to be won by Avorking for those twelve days. Now a man
who makes a comparable choice must be called an absentee
and seen as a traitor. Production and more production of
goods has become an end for which the land may be turned

216

LAND AND MACHINES

to a wilderness, while individual lives are sacrificed as readily
as the victims of the Aztec gods.

There is a new fetish, the Standard of Living, a material
measure hardly related to the enjoyment of life. Its wor-
shippers believe that the ‘dirt, stink and noise’ so long ago
recognized by Young, with the additional massive ugliness
of the nineteenth century and the shoddiness of the twentieth
are of no importance when set beside this artificial measure.
So far have we in Britain been enslaved to this fetish that
when we go to another country and sec people with light in
their faces and beauty all round them wc dare not think them
fortunate if at the same time we sec they have not very much
money. Yet here in this once most lovely island people will
spend all that they have been able to save and their few
most precious days of holiday in flying from tlie dirt, stink,
noise and ugliness in which they must spend the other fifty
weeks of the year. Surely it is time to recognize not a
standard of living but a standard of values, in which beauty,
comeliness and the possibility of solitude have a high place
among liuinan needs It must be estabhshed that it is not
sentimental to value a fine stretch of fanning land more
highly than the five thousand tons of iron ore wliich can be
snatched from it, or to believe that life and amenity should
not be sacrificed to production, to the rapacity of the
machine. In America vast stretches of countryside have the
lack of form and sanctity which shows it only to have been
tilled since the age of exploitation; the American people, the
most successful materialists in the history of the world, are
now often to be found speaking with loathing of their own
life and with nostalgic envy of the happiness of primitive
peoples.

If the memories brought together in this book have any

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A LAND

meaning, men must still need to live in some direct and
creative relationship witli the land from which they have
come. They cannot fail to be the poorer for its impoverish-
ment, to be scarred by its mutilation. The people of diis
island should put their hearts, their hands, and all the spare
energy which science has given them into the restoration of
their country. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
gangs of navvies moved about like shock troops embanking,
tunnelling, bridge building. Now such forces could be

mustered to clear the filthv litter which the Revolution has

left in its wake. Instead, wealth is spent on patching minds
and bodies damaged by ‘dirt, stink and noise’, and in
attempting to educate children who arc condemned to live
in surroundings which would make die educated pro-
foundly unhappy. No matter if such an achievement would
take a few points off the standard of living or an acre or so
from the desert of industrial leisure. They would not be
grudged.

Once materialism had been so far denied, it should be
possible to go further. What men produced from the stuff
of their land could slowly be brought into the service of
good living; satisfaction in the work itself would be recog-
nized as a positive aim. Ruskin may be repudiated for vain
fishing in the waters of the past, but he was sane among
madmen in insisting on the importance of the nature of
work, of giving an opportunity to individual creativeness.
Only by accepting this value and by striving to achieve it
wherever it is suitable can the growth of standardization be
checked, the possibility for the revival of local culture be
established.

Such values are too expensive. This country cannot afford
to give its wealth to enrich the quality of human life.

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LAND AND MACHINES

Britain must export or die! Is it not far more likely that
Britain will export and die?

At present with the excess of human beings created by the
Revolution and a land, in spite of all contrary pretence, still
only partially cultivated, perhaps we cannot afford to seek
these values. But is there any coherent plan to bring them
within future reach? Controlling intellects could justify their
power by using all social and scientific means to increase the
amount of food raised from the land, while at the same time
encouraging a deliberate reduction of population. The
reality of this island’s outline, lost only a century ago, would
be restored when its people could feed themselves if need
arose. Yet there is no sign that the consciousness armed with
power wliich is the State is starting on this path to sal-
vation. When conflict arises agriculture (as well as beauty
and amenity) is still sacrificed to industry; the State supports
measures to increase the population.

A nan can enjoy good relations with other men only if he
is a whole being, reasonably secure within the boimdaries of
his personality; so, too, a land is only ready to join a com-
munity of lands if it has this fundamental self-sufficiency and
confidence. It is easy for the intellect to conceive higher
forms of organization for mankind, but the intellect, that
most distinguished creation of life, is alw^ays far removed
from the forces which move life itself. I know at least
that my own love for Britain, for the land and people con-
tained within these coasts, is only heightened by my
delight in other lands, each with its own distinctive creation
and being, each shaped by its outline of coasts, mountains
and rivers.

I have allowed my inheritance of consciousness to argue
and posture. It is — ^it must be, for here it is — the simple

219

A LAND

reaction of a consciousness exposed at a particular point in
time and space. I display its arguments, its posturings, as
imprints of a moment of being as specific and as limited
as the imprint of its body left by a herring in Cretaceous
slime.

CHAPTER X

Prospect of Britain

I BEGAN TO PONDER tlicsc rccollcctions lying in dark-
ness in the empty tray of my garden. Now I have left
a hollow for an eminence and night for day. On Prim-
rose Hill I command the licart of London, a grey-blue
morass of trees and houses, and, thrusting througli it,
many of the buildings whose creation I have recalled : St,
Paul’s with its bubble-like dome anchored between four
towers, tlic Houses of Parliament, the surprising pinnacles of
the St. Pancras Hotel. I know, too, that among all the
liuman beings who swarm in these houses and the inter-
vening grooves that arc London’s streets, there are present
the king and queen of this island — a king and queen who
may now be the ideal for bourgeois domesticity and also
hard-w'orked officials, but who must always remain the
symbol for the unity of a people and its land — and thcrc'
fore the symbolic centre of my own theme.

Close at hand is the lively, variegated clutter of the allot-
ments where the Boroughs of St. Pancras and Hampstead
rent small patches of poor soil to their citizens. The ruimer
beans still make luxuriant green tents, but the cabbages are
weary, past their prime. Then lower down and further off
is the artificial geology of the Mappin Terraces, proclaim-
ing that strange institution the Zoological Gardens. Wild-
ness of a kind that we have banished from our own country-
side we gather from all over the globe and concentrate
on these few acres in Regent’s Park. Here, staring at the
ancient perfection of wild creatures, wc experience deep

221

A LAND

recognitions penetrating very far below die surface of
diings.

To my right, the line of low liills and terraces that make
the south bank of the Thames valley lead the eye eastward
towards the estuary, and so carry the imagination onwards
again to capture a sense of the wdiole outline of die island
that I have now brought back to this moment of time. Sit-
ting here on my little hill, my lump of London Clay, I can
summon piecemeal before my inner eye die Britain amassed,
shvipcd and peopled during the course of these memoirs. A
creation ranging in age from that scarlet beanflower in the
allotment, that plump baby on the path, to the gneisses of
the Outer Hebrides. For my own pleasure I shall rehearse
before me scenes from the regions of this country wliich
have been built up one after another and have together
achieved this present moment. I shall see what they look like
in the delicate balance of all that has happened. In doing so
I shall start with the youngest, and in starting with the
youngest it is plain that I should start witli cities, the cities
with which I have just ended. Cities represent the latest
deposits in Britain formed not as the quiet outcome of
denudation, or the violence of volcanic eruption, not as
with coralline and other organic rocks as a direct result
of physical existence, but as the conscious activity of a
species w^hich has robbed a thousand strata to make them.
Yet if I wxrc to attempt to examine cities in this way I should
have to include a country town that is an organic part of the
life of the countryside, a cathedral city, an industrial city, a
port; then again I should have to look at a northern stone-
built industrial city climbing on its hills as well as its brick
counterpart sprawling on the Midland plain; a port in a
recent estuary and another in an ancient rocky coast. There

222

PROSPECT OF BRITAIN

would be no end. Instead I will take one sample — I will look
for a moment at my own street, the street down there at the
foot of the hill. It is widish and greyish, with terraces of
houses built about the middle of the nineteenth century; the
earlier ones a heavy, partly stuccoed post-Gcorgian, the
later paying tribute to the Gothic revival in cast-iron columns
and capitals and the approach to dog’s tooth displayed on the
bow windows. Against the hill are detached houses with gar-
dens and in these are preserved the last mementoes of the
days a century ago when this was a region of gardens and
meadows lying round Chalk Farm. There are poplar and
acacia and one magnificent black pear tree whose springtime
fountain of blossom seems every year to cry out against its
present confinement. Half-way along the road is a lofty pedi-
mented building in a subdued Roman style, a factory which
luitil recently made pianos (those tinkling, not very good
pianos that must have been so much a part of the late Victor-
ian and Edwardian scene, equally in parlours and in pubs).
Now it is given over to electric light bulbs. The Fitzroy Road
bricks came, I guess, from the Midlands, the shiny slates from
North Wales, the cast iron for our Gothic colunms and the
heavy area railings from goodness knows where in the iron-
coal country. The York Stone paving, woni by footsteps
into attractive miniature landscapes, survives in the side
streets but has recently been replaced in Fitzroy Road itself
by lifeless cement slabs. The old kerbstones, however, still
remain ; most of them a pink granite, its crystalline structure
showing clearly on surfaces smoothed by the passage of feet
and the bumping up and down of perambulators.

The inhabitants come from as many quarters as the
materials and they keep the mark of locality in the voices
that float or ricochet between the houses. I have not detected

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A LAND

the survival of any corresponding local habit or skill save in
the north-country ruddle that is used on a few door steps.
Not many people know one another intimately, but they
know much of one another. It takes the comings and goings
of a funeral fully to unite us. There is one immortal. W. B.
Yeats as a small boy lived for a few years at Number 23, he
who wrote tliat in Ireland they were all ‘like coral insects,
with some idea in our heads of tlie ultimate island’. He did
not like and may have detested Fitzroy Road, but a little
of it was in him and I claim that a breath of his permeates the
street. He still might find it pleasant to wander through it in
the evening when die old-fishioncd lamps arc burning with
a cheerful yellow light, and the rows of cliimney pots, squat
and tall, vaned, cowled or naked, stand against a clear green
sky, a ragged but friendly army mounting guard over our
roof-trees.

This stray sample, then, must represent all those dense
urban deposits tlirown up by the tremendous outbursts of
human energy during the last few centuries. Perhaps it is
enough, for these cities where men try to live in a world of
their own making, remote from the substance and rhythms
of the land, have no more detailed contribution to make to
the development of my theme. I can now leave them, and I
do not conceal my delight in leaving them, for some part of
East Anglia, that countryside so largely founded on glacial
drifts almost as young as man. It is a countryside owing
something of its present character to Constable who saw it
with such a brilliant eye that now his vision affects the whole
scene.

The track leading to the farm is furrowed by two deep
grooves cut by iron-shod cart wheels in the buttery mud of
early spring and now so hard that the harvest wagons must

224

PROSPECT OF BRITAIN

follow them as though they ran on steel rails. On the right
there is a hedge banked with nettles where the deserted nests
of whitethroats are still hanging. Above the hedge, a little
raffish with wisps of hay plucked from passing loads, are elm
trees that make tremendous verticals against the gentle
undulations of hedge and field. Every leaf gleams dully in
the summer sun, and yet all arc merged in tlie mass of heavy
foliage, in the full rounded heads tliat repeat in sombre green
tiie dazzling forms of the cumulus clouds hanging almost
motionless above them.

Tlie square red-brick farmhouse, built in tlie high farming
days of the eighteenth century, would in isolation be too
uncompromising, too austere, but it is softened by an apron
of flower garden and by a huge pear tree that is trained up
the wall like a tree of Jesse and lifts its clusters of bronzed
fruit even as far as the eaves. The byres and barns have
grown round it with the instinctive perfection of the build-
ings that men raise for their own use. Some arc of flint; one,
(T tarred wcatlicr-boarding, offers the deepest and richest
tone in the wlic»le landscape. Dominating them all, larger in
bulk tlian the firmliouse itself, is the great barn, built to
store the wealth of five hundred acres of fine corn land. Its
roof is magnificent. The long soft curves of the crest follow
tliosc of the timber within, and where at each gable it rises
to a little peak it is repeating East Anglia’s faint memory of
tlie dragon-headed finials of the Viking settlers. The form is
lo\ ely, blit it is tlie colour that is triumphant. If the elms
hold the dro wsiness of August, here is tlie complementary
blare. From end to end the rose-pink tiles arc overgrown
with a lichen whose ycllow% seen against that cloud-hung
sky, makes a sliivcr run down my spine. This is a combina-
tion of man and nature impossible in Fitzroy Road. Man

22 S

A LAND

builds, and quickly, helped by the wind, by birds, the
lichen gives its blessing to his work, spreading across it ‘plate
on plate’, just as the martins come and with globule on
globule of mud fit their plump nests below the eaves.
Perhaps lichen signifies decay, but is decay less blessed, less
valuable than youth?

I have not yet looked at the open left-hand side of the
track, and here lies the inspiration of all the rest. The muddy,
chalk-mixed silts spread by the melting ice, enriched bv
the decay of uncounted forest autumns, have made unrivalled
wheat-lands. Since tliey were cleared of trees by generations
of British, Anglo-Saxon and Englisli, farmers too wise to
slight the Great Goddess have guarded the fertility of these
fields. Now in the August hush and sun the dense army of
the wheat stands waiting for the harvest. Tliis vision is less
that of Constable than of Palmer who has heightened our
sense of tliis massive ripeness. The countless straight stems
make a golden twilight where a few poppies burn; the
countless tawny cars are so evenly, so closely ranged that it
seems the Great Goddess herself might walk across them to
attend her altars.

Now, quickly, I turn to the chalk country with a speed
allowing a full realization of tlic dificrence of atmosphere, of
light and colour. There arc the qualities which Paul Nash
achieved with his cunning exposure of the white surfice of
his paper. A pallor natural to the chalk that seems also to
penetrate the air, to reflect from all colours. Among the
swelling summits I can look along a recession of headlands,
point beyond point, until they merge into one unbr(du'ii
line. Several carry small beech clumps planted during tliat
short period when landowners played wdth the countryside
to satisfy aesthetic fasliion. Each clump has a domed form

226

PKOSPECT OF BRITAIN

liarnionizing perfectly with those of the lulls; the outer trees
are low, stunted by the winds that shoot up the hollow
combes and over the plateaux, wliile the innermost grow
tall in pursuit of the light. Just now tlic lean, cruel buds have
recently broken and the twigs arc sliot with the brilliant
green of young leaves that arc still crumpled like the wings
of a newly emerged butterfly. In the sheltered heart of the
clumps last year’s foliage still clings to the lower branches,
tatters of orange that mutter with the passage of the wind,
the talk of old women warning the green generation of
what they, too, must come to when the sap runs back.

The turf is of finely matted fescue grass with, blades as
narrow as pine needles and crisp to the touch. Between the
Idades twine many little plants that never cliokc the grass,
yet arc never themselves expelled; wild thyme, harebell,
milkw'ort, each to be distijiguished by the intimate detail of
leaf, stem and growth. Of them all only the wild violets
have as yet put out a few tentative blossoms to try the spring.

Now^licrc else in Britain can tlicrc be curves like those of
the chalk downs; huge quantities of ciialk Jiavc been
denuded to shape tliesc muscular hills, the smooth hollow’'s
of the combes. It is ironical tliat tliis easy dissolution should
l).avc given the chalk hills such strength and tensity; it
w ould seem that instead of having been wx>rn away particle
after particle by water and wind some sculptor had suc-
ceeded in achieving that sense of force thrusting from
within, of tautness of surface for which Henry Moore
battles with his hard Liassic stones.

Here among tlic summits one is reminded more of the
men and business of the past than of the present. The turf-
bound clialk preserves every considerable mark made by the
Stone and Iron Age peoples who lived up here islanded

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A LAND

among forests. The even contours of the next headland are
nicked by the banks and ditches of a Celtic fort, while much
closer at hand there is a mound which covered a Bronze Age
chieftain for over three thousand years before a Victorian
successor, an luiskilled pioneer of consciousness, pulled out
his bones, pots and weapons. On more distant slopes the low
spring sun shows the outline of the Celtic fields as a faint
reticulation, while on another are the earliest of all industrial
scars, the dents and hummocks of long-deserted flint iiiincs.

Yes, these uplands belong to memory, and these shadow y
hieroglyphs record the fluidity oi human life, the speed wnrh
W'hich it may flow in blind weaves from region to region.
But it is only the summits that arc deserted, present-day life
pushes up towards them. In East Anglia, once tlic Resistance
of the forests had been broken, men had it all their own way
w’ith the land. There it was, a passive possession, wide
stretches of rich soil whose gentle rise and fill did no more
than undulate the lines of the hedges. Here, though tlic
resistance of the land is still slight, it is enough to defend
these tops against human settlement. From the wide, shallow
trough of the valley the hcdgeless fields lap up against the
turf, the highest arc almost white and the growtli of tlic
young oats is meagre, sometimes failing altogether on
patches of flint and broken chalk. Fartlicr diawn the earth
mellows and bctwx'cii the rectangles of light brown, as
softly shaded as the side of an antelope, there arc a few field s
already green with spring corn. About half-way dowm to
the valley bottom is a sudden line of firms and hamlets
standing among trees; so closely do they follow a single
contour tliat they look as though they were standing along
the edge of a lake. Ti ns is the line at which the springs break
out from below the chalk.

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PROSPECT OF BRITAIN

Where woods of ash, and beech.

And partial copses, fringe the green hill foot . . .

There wanders by a little nameless stream

That from the hill wells forth, bright now and clear.

Or after rain with chalky mixture grey.

But still refreshing in its shallow course
The cottage garden.

Most of the smaller houses are built out of their surround-
ings — chalk rammed on a timber frame, raised on a rough
stone or brick footing and deeply thatched. Some instead of
chalk daub show skilfully cut blocks of chalk. There is a
saying in this country, ‘Give chalk a good hat and shoes and
it will serve you well’.

Immediately below I can look down onto a thatched roof
with eaves so wide that I can hardly see the low walls, but
can distill guisli every detail of the mossy thatch like a
bulging old stTa quilted in green velvet.

I listen to the larks as they make their brief excursions to
die sky; not far up the valley a tractor-drawn plough, wnth
a plume of gulls in its waike, is making a darker patch in the
wide expanse of pale browns and greens.

Behold behind it as the vale recedes
And falls into a flat the eye scarce sees,

A family of hills, some near, sonic far.

Withdrawing till their faint expiring tops
Are almost lost and melted into air.

It is somewhere there that the downs meet the sea and add
their magnificent w^hite cliffs to the outline of England.

I try to summon to my inner eye some prospect of the
Cotswolds, for nowhere in England have men made a
sw eeter use of the land than there where the fleece of sheep
helped to raise the honey-coloured limestone into towns,
villages and great houses; into superb churches wdth walls

229

A LAND

little more than a framework for the glowing display of
glass.

That proud scarp of the Cotswolds above the flat Severn
valley comes before me with its hill forts, chambered tombs
of the Stone Age and the lofty maypole on Coopers Hill
where the boys chase roiling cheeses into the valley. I see,
too, the pear orchards toaming up the foot of the scarp as
though the green sea of the valley was breaking in waves on
the hills. Then the narrow defile of the Stroud valley in-
trudes itself, with its terraces of neat stone houses climbing
so steeply that the chimneys of one arc level with the door
steps of the next above, a piece of early rural industrializa-
tion where the eighteenth-century wool-weaving fictorics
look like country mansions. Then the round stone-built
columbarium at Upper Slaughter with its conical roof;
inside range upon range of openings filled with cooing
doves, white wings beating in the confined space and tlic
birds spilling through die opening at the top of the cone to
be seen for a moment floating against the summer sky before
dicy settle on the grey gable of the manor house.

Yet it is only these odd and particular scenes that present
themselves from this exquisite region — which is one tlnit,
extraordinarily enough, has produced no painter or writer
able to impose his vision upon it. When I look for a region
built during this middle distance of time whicli 1 have now
reached, it is the Yorkshire dales that appear in their entirety.
Indeed, it is suitable tlicy should do so, for there is something
in the life of these limestone valleys of the eastern Pcnnincs
that winds into the licart of my theme. Here I am already
in the true highland country though not yet near its ancient
foundations. The Cotswolds arc a stone countryside, but no
more than the chalk has it the character of the highlands, it

230

PROSPECT OF BRITAIN

is a part of die English lowlands and has their virtues of
tolerance and ease and dieir vices of too much tolerance and
too much case. Then, again, although the liarmony that men
have sounded there is one of the most delightful in the world,
it is already some way out of life, a National Reserve for the
charm of old England. It is, too, a country of large farms
and estates where the resistance ofJcTcd by nature to com-
plete domination by man is still too sliglit to be stimulating.

In the West Riding dales none of these conditions pre-
vails. It is true highland with licathcr moors, rushing, peaty
streams and swift rivers and their accompanying curlew,
grouse, dippers, trout and salmon. It has few great houses,
having long been the property of tough smallholders; the
resistance of nature is strong, there is much to fight against
but not too much; there is no question of a desperate
struggle to make two blades of grass grow on bare rock.
Because of these qualities, no other part of Britain to my
mind so nearly conveys the emotion one experiences in
some of the peasant countries of Europe — in northern Italy,
for example, W'hcre the artificial terraces step up and up
towards rocky hill-tops until the topmost may show no
more than one vine or enough grain to make two loaves.
It is an emotion drawn from a sense that there is not a single
rocky outcrop or the smallest pocket of earth that has not
been instinctively assessed, fully exploited in the effort to
wring fertility from the land. I am not saying that this is
altogether desirable, but only that it stirs the heart. The
Yorkshire dales share sometliiiig of this appeal, but it is
combined with qualities that are bolder, more free and
heroic, in keeping with a country still largely peopled by the
descendants of Vikings. It shows itself in the determination,
so much greater than tlie pale encroachments of the chalk,

231

A LAND

with which the highest pastures of the fertile valleys bite into
the dark moorland tops. Wherever soil covers the rock a
little liighcr than usual a wall encloses it and all on the
human side is kept green, defended against the rough
assaults of the heather. It manifests itself too, in the hives for
honey bees kept on the remotest parts of the moors. Often
a row of these gleaming white mansions may be seen in one
of the peaty hollows where a slip of turf on rock has left
precipitous black walls.

There is no southern ease about the dales, nor is there any
artificiality or antiquarianisrii in tlicir life, they are too
prosperous, too close to stubborn industrial towns.

While the West Riding has produced no great nature
landscape painter, it was the dales tliat inspired tlie East
Anglian, John Sell Cotman, to his first important work. 1
do not think that Cotman has had the power to change our
vision, but he has perfectly expressed certain qualities of tlie
dales. Greta Bridge itself represents to perfection all the grey
stone bridges that span tlic dale rivers — the Ure, the Swale,
the Nidder, Skirhire, and the rest — the bridges that must
hump more and more steeply as the river dwindles tow\ards
the valley head. But Cotman ca>u]d never acliicvc for the
valleys wliat Emily Bronte has done lor the moors. She
listened to the laments of the curlew, to the harsh grouse
and 'the moorl.irk in the air\ theirs was her world, not that
of the sleek dipj)cr and salmon.

There is a spot, 'mid harreti bills,

Where winter howls, and drivinp^ rain;

But, if the dreary tempest chills,

There is a lioht that warms aqain.

'The mute bird sittinq on the stone.

The dank moss dripping from the wall,

The thorn-trees gaunt, the walls o' ergrown,

I kwe them — how I love them all!

232

PROSPECT OF BRITAIN

A little and a lone green lane
That opened on a common wide;

A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain
Of mountains circling every side.

A heaven so clear, an earth so calm.

So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air;

And, deepening still the dreamlike charm.

Wild tnoor-shcep feeding everywhere.

That tvas the scene, I knew it well;

I knew the turfy pathway's sweep.

That, winding o'er each billowy swell
Marked out the track of wandering sheep.

Wutheriiig Heights is an embodiment of the Yorkshire
moors; thinking of it I sec it stained with just that boding
colour of heather and peat in early winter before the snow
has fallen.

Between Cotinan and Emily Bronte, I cannot find that
any artist has either re-created or fully expreSvSed the country
that is to me the purest essence of the dales. I mean that kind
of landscape which is not found citlicr in the lower reaches
of the rivers nor on the wild uplands, but in the intermediate
territory wdicrc die valley is narrowing so much tliat no
more than one field on either side of the river is flat; where
road, river, and perhaps raiKvay, must run close together.
Here, too, the valley sides arc often stepped by natural
terraces and of tlicsc the highest may break through the
grass in naked limestone cliffs and crags.

Such is the landscape I see w hen I tliink of the dales. This
stony road has growai from ‘the little and the lone green
lane’ that leads down from the moor. The late sunlight is
flowing dowm the valley and seems at once to magnify and
mellow every feature of the scene. Most surely of all it
distinguishes the stone field walls that run across the valley,
dipping down in full curves from cliff to bottom, inter-

233

A LAND

rupted by the tree-grown meander of the river, then rising
again in equal curves to meet the opposite chlF. The long
green lining of the dale is striped by these transverse bars,
part stone, part softer shadow. The walls, built by hands with
millions of fragments from the limestone hills, seem a calm
assertion of the successful labour of generations, of tlie
conquest of this hard Pennine realm. Every stone, with its
own immense history held in it, has been handled, judged,
given its chitik to fill in a plan seen not on paper but freely in
the builder’s mind. Scattered among the fields, throwing
angular shadows, are die neat stone sheds whicli the dales-
men build far above their firms, and where tlicy keep
some hay and milk their cows in a richly-smelling gloom.
At this moment, with iron-shod boors ringing on the stony
track, fresh from milking a man passes with a zinc budget
strapped to his back. I can hear the milk slapping against
the sides of the can. Following him down with my eyes 1
see that the valley bottom is filling with shadows, the wall
bars are growing faint and the clustered village is steeped for
a moment in a paradisaical rose light before that, too, turns
grey, a fiding ash. I look straight at the sun that is causing
this havoc, sec it as a bulging, sagging mass on the lip of the
pass, then it is gone, leaving only a dancing green spot on my
inner eye,

I am pressing deeper towards the foundations of Britain,
but before I come to tliosc most ancient mountain fastnesses,
I will pause for a moment at the strange region of Charn-
wood Forest that has been mentioned in earlier chapters.
Leave industrial Leicester, where the wretched little exposure
of the Roman city is fenced off near the railway station,
escape painfully from the clinging red tentacles of the
suburban ribbon development, and suddenly find in the air

234

PROSPECT OF BRITAIN

a faint but palpable tang of wildness. Banks of bracken arc
beginning, there is some shaky drystone walling between
the fields, and the cottages by the roadside arc no longer of
brick but show a most curious, indeed a unique, colour and
texture. Their walls are built of sharp angular fragments of a
rock, far too hard for dressing, that liavc been sunk in thick
beds of mortar. This rock, formed before the beginning of
life, shows merging bands of dull purple and deep green.
I follow a mounting path first tlirough a small birch wood,
then through bracken, and in a few hundred yards am out
on a miniature upland plateau where the purple and green
rocks stick harshly, brutally, through the ground as bones
will tear through the flesh of a broken thigh. Standing on a
lower outcrop I can see the loftiest of them, glistening with
still harder veins of white quartz, biting directly onto the
rolling pastoral landscape with its comfortable hedges, its
abundant farms and villages.

Now at last sitting here on Primrose Hill among eight
million urban beings, I will summon for a last review those
mountain regions where even now the works of men are
trivial in the face of the colossal assertions of nature, where
instead of driving tractors over a thousand acres farmers are
grateful to hold a fringe of fields round the foothills and to
run their sheep among the heather.

Perhaps it would be most consistent with my purpose if I
chose the northern highlands or the western isles, for their
country is the most ancient and there men live in ways not
fiir removed from those of the preliistoric peoples whose
tombs survive all round them.

Yet it seems that I was not free to make this choice.
Instead, here is a craggy peak and the rocks on which I
crouch have the brittle crystallinity of what was once boil-

235

A LAND

iiig lava. The clouds arc all round me crowding their damp
breath into my face, trailing ragged fingers across my feet.
Occasionally there is a rent through which I can see a
further prospect of rocks, but it closes again and leaves this
opacity, this luminous but impenetrable envelope of grey-
ness. It smothers not only all observation but all thought; I
am conscious of nothing but consciousness, held here on the
rock and engulfed by chaos. It is a moment of the deepest
isolation and loneliness and yet also of a simple unity.
Chaos pales, begins to glare against the eyes as though this
were a tliird-degree examination of die possessor of con-
sciousness — but instead form is returning, I can see a rocky
path, a mountain shoulder littered with boulders; pine tree
tops begin to fill the void below me with their green tents.
The last clammy fingers of the clouds drag ovxr the Lang-
dale Pykes and are gone on the wind. I am looking out over
a vast configuration of mountain peaks, s^nne clear, some
still hung with cloud. Among them are gleams of water,
hhits and promises of the cataracts and the lakes caught up
in 'the wild catastrophe of the breaking mountains’. The
narrow valley at the foot of the Pykes has its road, its few
meadows, and I know that since the first Norsemen fought
their way between the rocks and the pine forests men have
held their plots wherever the moimtains and the lakes left
them room. Among them

There was a boy; ye knew him ioell, ye cliffs

Atid islands of PVituvidcr.

Wordsworth’s formulated philosophy is not mine, but there
w'as much in the experience leading to that philosophy, in
a mind cleaving so closely to its surroundings, that relates
him more closely than any other poet to my theme.

236

PROSPECT OF BRITAIN

. . . the tnsihle scene
Would enter unawares into his mind.

With all its solemn imagery, its rocks.

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.

Among the great company of poets physically and
imaginatively nourished by our land there are a few who
stand closer than the rest to their own countryside. Their
poetry, the images rising from the darkness of unconscious
memory, seem to be as much a part of the growth of that
countryside as the distinctive plants and animals which it
more directly supports. Hardy’s j>ocms grew from the
Wessex downlands, Clare’s from the tiny stretch of the
Midlands in which alone he felt at home; Crabbe’s are
the bitter fruit of the Norfolk coast:

Ikcrc poppies, noddinq, mock the hope of toil,

There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil.

Because of his gigantic stature as a poet and because he \vas
so utterly possessed by a feeling of man’s dependence on
nature, it is Wordsworth wdiose w'ork is most permeated by
his chosen country. He describes how" in the full lust of his
youth

. the sonndinq cataract
Haunted we like a passion, the tall rock:

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood.

Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a jecling and a love. . .

Yet the passion has proved mutual; he in his turn has per-
meated Cumberland. So much did he intertwine himself
wnth the mountains that later poets w'ritc of Wordsworth
as part of the landscape. One sees him as an old man who
came to know how

237

A LAND

. . . hateath the mutatiott of year and season
Flood and drought, frost and fire and thunder,

The Jrothy blossom of the rowan and the reddening of the berries.
The silt, the sand, the slagbanks and the shingle.

And the wild catastrophe of the breaking mountains.

There stands the base and root oj the living rock.

Thirty thousand jeet of solid Cumberland.

Wliilc anotlicr identifies him more simply:

No room for mourning: lie's gone out
Into the noisy glen, or stands between the stones
Of the gaunt ridge, or youll hear his shout
Rolling among the screes, he being a hoy again.

He'll never fail nor die

And if they laid his bones

In the wet vaults or iron sarcophagi

OJ Janie, he\l rise at the first summer rain

And stride across the hills to seek

His rest among the broken lands and clouds.

He was a stormy day, a granite peak
Spearing the sky; and look, about its base
Words flower like crocuses in the hatiging tvoods.

Blank though the dalehead and the bony face.

I have brought together in consciousness a few of tlie
pieces that make this island ot Britain, pieces whose sliaping
in time by geological process, by organic life, by human
activity and imagination I have already described. I liave
ended with those mountains tliat can symbolize the founda-
tions both of our consciousness and of this land. I must draw
round it tlic containing coasts — the curved sandy bays,
shingle spits and desolate salt marshes, the infinite variety of
the rocky coasts broken by savage inlets and by peaceful
coves, adorned with caves, arches, islets and towering stacks
and visited by the grey, white and black birds of the sea.

I will close it with the long line of the chalk cliffs. Into them
I must set esplanades and bungalows, hotels and boarding-

238

PROSPECT OF BRITAIN

houses; fishing towns and villages; docks, jetties and piers;
estuaries thronged with pleasure craft, and crowded ports,
and round them all the movements of the small craft, tlie
coming and going of great ships. So I have tried to celebrate
the creation of this land and our consciousness of it and
there is no more to be done except to express thankfulness
for ‘An appetite; a feeling and a love . .

It was spring when I began to write and now September
lias put cool fingers and a few leaves into the air. While I
have written, the sea has swallowed a gobbet of land in one
place, released a few square yards in another; there have
been losses and gains in the flow of consciousness. Again I
see die present moment as a rose or a cup held up on the
stem of all that is past. Or is it perhaps after all that spiral
shell in which I once lieard the call of the plover; into which
1 can look to sec all things taking shape and where the
bottom-most point is one widi tliis last convolution?

APPENDIX

GEOLOGICAL TIME-SCALE

GEOLOGICAL SYSTEMS TIME-RANGES

AGE IN MILLIONS (Maximum thicknesses in feet) OF

OF YEARS QUATERSARr LIFE-GROUPS

PLIOCENE

iB.ooo ft.

MIOCENE

a 1,000 ft.

OLIGOCENE

15,000 fi.

EOCENE

a 3, 000 ft.

CRETACEOUS

64,000 ft.

JURASSIC

a a, 000 ft.

TRIASSIC

25.000 ft.

PERMIAN

18.000 ft.

CARBONIFEROUS

i 40,000 ft.

DEVONIAN

37,000 It.

SILURIAN

2«0,000 ft.

ORDOVICIAN

40,ooo ft.

CAMBRIAN

40,000 ft.

PRE-CAMBRIAN

unknown tiiu.kncss

f Quaternary (Pleistocene and Holocene) 4,000 Jeet,

MAMMALS

75-45 Million Years Ago

Index

ABINGTON, cottafi^es at, 138
ADONIS, Garden of, 83
AILSA CRAIG, 20

ALABASTER, uscd for sculpturc, I20;
Keuper, 120

ALBA, name for Scotland, 163
ALBION, 9, 79; name for Britain,

163, 175

ALLIGATORS, 90
ALPINE RACE, 161

ALPS, The 85; formation of 23, 85;

mountaineering in, 23
AMERICA, 80, 84; reptiles in, 78;
grain, 213; exploitation of
land in, 217
AMMONITES, 1 9, 28, 1 67
AMPHIBIANS, 61, 64
ANGLES, invasion of, 183
ANGLESEY, 1 65

ANGLO-SAXON, period, 183 -9

ANNE, QUEEN, rcign of, I97

ANNTNG, MARY, 59, 73-4, IO4, 110

ANSES, gods, 161

ANSTON STONE, 1 1 8

ANTELOPES, 9 1

APES, 92

ARCHAEOLOGISTS, II, 26, 31

ARCHAEOPTERYX, 77

ARKWRIGHT, SIR RICHARD, I98, 2O3

ARNOLD, MATTHEW, 21 I

ARRAN, Goatfell, 86

ARTHUR, KING, 1 87

ASHDOWN FOREST, 85

ATHENS, 13

ATLANTIC OCEAN, 79 , 84
ATLANTIS, 56, 65, 79 -80
AUSTEN, JANE, 72

AVEBURY, 162, 164, 174; sarsens
for buildings, 132
AXES, stone and flint, 157

BACKBON"E, The 54
BAGSHOT SANDS, 85
BARNACK STONE, I07, 1 26
BARNWELL, 1 26; Abbey, Stone for,
107

BARRY, SIR JAMES, I18
BASALT, 16, 21

BATH STONE, 72, 76, I27; for

building, 127-30
BRER STONE, 134
BELEMNirEH, 1 9
BEi-GAi:, 'Fhe, I 73“4
BEOWULF, 185

BIRDS, 67; earliest, 77; and poets, 8
BIRMINGHAM, 196, 204; giiol, Stone
for, 1 1 7

BLACK PASTURE, quaiTieS tit, I16
BLUE STONES, I OO
BODMIN MOOR, 21, 65
ROLSOVER MOOR, I18
BOX STONE, 128
BOURNEMOUTH, 9 1
BRACHIOPODS, 48, 5 I
BRADFORD, 204; town hall, Stone
for, 117; waterworks, stone for,
117

BRICK, for building, 138
BRISTOL CHANNEI., 87
BRITAIN, growing sclf-conscious-
ness of: through religious uni-
formity, 164; in mind of Bronze
merchants, 165-6; in Belgic
kingdoms, 173; as Roman Pro-
vince, 177; through Domesday
Book, 189; through Saxton’s
Maps, 194

Bntafinia, Camden’s, 194
BRITISH MUSEUM, 1 75; stonc for, 130
BRONTE, EMILY, 232-3
BRITONS, survival of, in west and
north, 188

BRONZE AGE, 52, 162-8; Cremation
in, 163

BRONZE INDUSTRY, 1 65
BRYTHONIC LANGUAGE, 170
BUCKINGHAM, DUKE OF, 74
BUCKLAND, WTLLIAM 74, I50
BUDE, 65

BUILDING AND HOCKS, 105-37
HUNTER PEBBLE BEDS, IJO

CADER IDRIS, SI
CAENOZOIC ERA, 83, Ql
CAEN Stone, 107
CAESAR, JULIUS, 1 75

241

A LAND

CAITHNESS FLAGSTONES, II 3 - 1 4
CALEDONIAN, rocks, 50-~i; canal, 5(S;
mountains, 57

CAMBRIAN, period, 32, 44-5, 47-9;
rocks. 46, 1 1 1 ; rocks, for building,
113-17

CAMBRIDGE, Stone for buildings in,
126-7, 130; Castle Hill 192

CAMBRIDGESHIRE CHI'RCHliS, build-
ing materials in, 134

CAMDEN, WILLIAM, 1 94
CAMULODU NGM , 1 7 2-4
CAMULOS, Celtic war god, 172
CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, StOnC for,

107

CARBONIFEROUS period, 33, 62;

forests, 63
CARSTONE, 13 I, 135
CASSITEUIDES, and tin, 175
CASSI VELLAU NUS ,175
CAVES, as dwellings, 148
CAXTON, WILLIAM, 193
CELTS, invasions of, 168; settled
farming of, 168; language of,
170

CEMENT, 72, 140

CHALK, 18-19, 79 , 80-1; Red, 80;
for building, 13 1; scene in down-
land, 226" 9

ClIANCTONBURY RING. 171
CHARNWOOD FOHFu^T, 43, 6 q, 8o;

description of, 234-5
CHATSWORTH, Il6
CHAUCER, GEOFFREY, 1 93
CHESHIRE PLAIN, The, 97
CHEVIOTS, The, 31, 97
CHILLFSFORI) BEDS, 89
CHILTERN HILUS, 87
CHRISTIANITY, 40, 214; as Unifying
force, 196

CHURCH STRETTON, I 1 1
CIRCLES STONE, 1 0 1
CLARE, JOHN, 237

CLAY, 18, 19; Kimmeridge, 74;

Oxford, 74

CLEVELAND HILUS, 72, 93
CLIPSHAM STONE, I 19
CLUNCH, for building, 134
COAL, 62-3, 1 95 "-6, 199, 202
COAST, as an outline, 9, 212, 219,
238; Its products, 143
COB, for building, 136
COBBETT, WILLIAM, 85
COBBLE, for building, 135; for
pavements, 136

COKE, THOMAS, 211-12
COLOUR, 44, 83, 92; in birds, 77
CONSCIOUSNESS, I I, 27, 34-4 1, 92-3,
141, 14S, 166, 197, 201, 215,
219-20, 239 *

CONIFERS, 6r, 76, 91
CONNEMARA, 56

CONSTABLE, JOHN, 224, 226; paint-
ing of Stonehenge, 133
cooper’s hill, cheese rolling, 230

COPPER, 165, 169
CORAL RAO, for building, 124
CORNWALL, 23, 58, 65, 87
CORPUS CHRisTi COLLEGE, Cam-
bridge, stone for, 126
CORRIES, 96
COTllAM MARBLE, 12 1
COTMAN, JOHN SELL, 232-3
COTSWOLD HILI-S, 71, 95; building
in, 122; scenery and buildings
in, 229-30
COW'S, earliest, 90
cox, DAVID, 213
CRAB BE, GEORGE, 1 44, 1 97 , 237
CRABS, 75

CRAG, Red, 89; Coralline, 89
CRETACEOUS, period, 28, 33, 79-80;
period, its influences on human
settlement, 155; rocks for build-
ing, J31

CRiNOiDS, or sca-lilics, 52, 75
CHOMALT HILLS, 55
CROMER FOREST BED, 89
Cl MBERLAND, 55, 66, 69
CUN OBELI N, 17 3
CW’MS, 95
CYCADS, 76-7

DALF:S, YORKSHIRE, 23O-I
DANES, settlement of, 189
DARBYS of Shropshire, The, and
iron-smelting, 202
DARTMOOR, 21, 65, 87
DE LA BECHE, 74, 1 I9
DE WINT, PETER, 213
DEE, river, 94
DEER, 91

DEFOE, DANIEL 172
DELABOLE, 58
DENUDATION, 17-18, 22
DERJ-LICTION, industrial, 208
DERWENT, river, 94
DEVON, 23, 33, 58, 65-6, 84
DEVONIAN PERIOD, 54, 57, 60-T
DEVONSHIRE, DUKE OF, I16

242

INDFX

DINICHTHYS, 6o
DINOSAliR, 78, 82
DIPLODOCX'S, 78

DOLOMITE, see Limeslonc, Maj>:ne-
siiin •

DOMESDAY ROOK, 1 89-91
DOWNS, North, 31, 85, 87; South,
31, 85; hint mines, on, 157;
Epsom, 87
DRAC;ONELIES, 64
Dm. IDS, 164
DRUMLINS, g6
DDDLEY LOCUSTS, 53
DUNSTAliLi: DOWN, 52
DURHAM CATHEDHAL, 1()2
DYING GOD, 'J‘he, 83

EARTH, 12; formation of, 11, 15
}:ast anoita, 'J'crtiary formations
in, 89; scene in, 224

ECMINODERMS, 52

EDINRUHOH, CilStle, 86, 96; ilijs'h-
landers in, 172
EDOVSrONE mC.IITHOUSE, IO9
i-nniTEENrH century, 197; rela-
tionship of men and land in the,
143-4

EINSTEIN, ALBERT, 34-5
ELTH'HAN'IS, 91
ELIOT, T. S. I l6
ELIZABETH, QLT'EN, 194
ELY ('ATfIKDRAL, Stonc for, lOj
1 :.NN 1 SKII..LEN, EARL OI-, 74
EOCENE, PERIOD, 33 , Ql
EROS, as a creative force, 83, 92
evston station, London, stone
for, 1 17
Evoia xioN, 29

EXMOOR, 87

EARI.EY, ROBERT, 128 , 1 34
EAR.MiNO, earliest, 155; settled, 168,
172; and Industrial Kevolution,
21 1 13

FEAR, dawn of, 60
E'ENI.AND LAKE, 94
FERN TREE, 6 I

I inchley road, London, 95

FIREFLIES, 25

FIHF. OF LONDON, 'rhc, 129
FISHES, 33, 59 '6o, 71; effect on
building stone, 113
FFIZROY ROAD, LONDON, 223-4,
225

FIVE TOWNS, The, 205

FLAGSTONES, CAITHNESS, I13-I4
flinTvS, for building, 135; Mining,
*57

FLOWERS, first, 83
FOLKTfiN, ovvl-fiiced idols from,
162

FORAMINIFERA, l8
1-OREST, 172; Oarhoniferous, 61-5,
795, 202; advance of after Ice
Age, 98; pine, its spread after
Ice Age, 152; deciduous, 153;
clearance of, 158; clearance of by
Anglo-Saxons, 188; final clear-
ance of, 194; Arden, 194, 196;

And red, 194; Dean, 170, 194;

lapping, 194; New, 194; Scl-

vvood, 194; Sherwood, 194;

Windsor, 194

FORTS, C.’cltic Iron Age, 171
FOSSH.S, 27, 81; formation of, iq
FREI'STONF, 1 10, 125-6
F’HOt.’MORE MAUSOLEUM, lOq

(JABBRO, 21

(;ault. So
OAZELLRS, 91
<;ai:i.ic LAN(a;A(;E, 170

GEOLOGICAL MUSF.UM, LONDON, I iq
GHOLISTS, 26, 31
<;iNK(;o, 77
CIRTIN, THOMAS, 96
GLACl.vnoN, effects of, 97
GLACIERS, 93 '7
GLAS rONBURY, StOnC for, 122
GNEISS, 44

GOLD, 22, 196, 213; ornaments, 166;
power of, t66

(iONDW AN ALAND, 45"6, 56, 69, 7Q
GOTHIC ARCHITl-OTURi;, 14J

cough's cave, Cheddar, 150

(;ramitans, 'I’hc, 56

GHANTTE, 1 6, 21, 87, 92, 106, IO9;

shap, 97; kerbs, 223
GUAfTOLITES, 48-9, 51, 54, 67
GREAT GLEN, 23, 55-6
GREENSAND, 85; lowcr, 80
(GRAVES, ROBERT, 161 -2
GRETA BRIDGE, 232
GRIFFIN, THOMAS, tilc Worker, 124
grimes’ graves, flint mines, 157;

fertility shrine at, 158
Gryphaea, 27, 72

Hadrian’s wall, 177

IIAMBLEDON HILLS, 72

243

A LAND

HAMPSHIRE BASIN, 84
HAMPSTEAD, gravels at 87
HARDY, THOMAS, 171, 237
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL, 126, 1 34
HEADIN' GTON STONE, 125-6
HEADLEY HEATH, 87
HEDGES, 104, 210
HEKLA, Mt. 23
HELOISE AND ABELARD, 36
HEREEORD CATHEDRAL, StOne for,
119

HEREFORDSHIRE, 58
HEROIC SOCTFTY, in Anglo-Saxofi
Englant.1, 184
HERRING, Cretaceous 81
HTGHGATE, gravels, S7
HIGHLANDS. Scottish, 31. 44, 80;
settlement of in Neolithic period.
156

HIMALAYAS, 85
HODI IKIN, J. E., 16 1
HOtJARTH, WILLIAM, 144
HOLIDAYS, contrasted with holy
days, 209
HOLKILVM, 2 T I 12
HORSES, earliest, 90; herds of, 91
HORSETAH., 6 I
HORNTON STONE, I 03

norsEs OF parliament, 221; stone
for, 1 18-19
HOl.'SMAN. A. E., 53

HCMBF.Ti, river, 94

HTNSTANTON, 131; cliiTs at, lO, 80;

suhmorged forest at, lo

HEXLEV, ALDOUS, 70

ICE AGE, The, 87, 89, 1 44 "5;

Pleistocene, 93; elfect on country-
side, 95
ICEBERGS, 97
ICESHEETS, 96
ICHTHYOSA! K, 71, 74, 7S
IGDANODONS, 90
INDIAN OCEAN, 84

INDO-EUROPEANS, and Sky God, i6i
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, Thc, 199-

214

INSECTS, 61, 83
IRELAND, 56, 93

IRON, introduced, 169; Age, 169-
75; .smelted with coke, 202
IRON AND COAL AGE, 202*4
IRONBRIDGF. on Severn, 94, 203,
IRONSTONE, 72
ISLE OF MAN, 46^ 56

ISLE OF WIGHT, 86, 9 1
ISOLATION OF BRITAIN, 1 53

JEHOVAH, 197

JELLYFISH, 47

JONES, INIGO, 128, 130

lUNO, her misplaced jealou.sy, 180

JUPITER, 12

JURASSIC, period, 28, 71, 75-6, 121;
period, its inHuences on human
settlement, 155; belt, 71-2, 75,
105, 155; belt, building stones
from. 1 27; belt, iron mines in, 170
JUTES, invasion of, 183

KAOLIN, 205

KENTISH RAO, building stone, 131
KEUPER, period, 70-1; rucks for
building, 119-21
KEYES, SIDNEY, 23S
KiMMERiDGE, clav, 74; shale, 74;
money, 75

king’s COLl.EGE, CAMBRIDGE, Stonc
for C'hapel, 107; .stone for
Bridge, n6

LAKE DISTRICT, The, 56, 97;

Norse settlement of, 189; scene
in, 236

1 AKES, Glacial, 94, 96; f lumber, 94;
Lapworth, 94, 203; Pickering, 94

I-AMMERMUIRS, 'I'hc, 54
LANCELET, 55
LAND’.S end, 21
I.ANGLAND, WTl.LIAM, I93
i.AXGt AGE, C eltic, 170, formation
(/f English, 193
7 -AVENHAM, buildings at, 137
LAWRENCE, D. H., 4 I, 1 67, 1 75
LEEDS, 204; town hull, Stone for,
1 17

LEGENDS, local, decay of, 200
LEICESTER GAOL, stone for, I 17
lemur:s, 91

LIAS, 19, 27, 71, 74, 103, 105

LIEBIG, BARON, 114

LIFE, emergence of, 34; Cambrian,
48-9; plant, 54, 61, 83; sequence

of, 174

HMK.STUNE, 18-19; Mountain, 62,
Mountain, for building, 1 14-17;
Carboniferous, 65; Magnesian
or Dolomite, 66; Magnesian,
fur building, 118; Oolitic, 71,
75 »

244

INDEX

LIVERPOOL EXCHANGE, Stone for,
II 7

LINCOLN EDGE, IO5
LOBSTER, 35 , 81

LOCALI^', Special products, 143,
destruction of, 215; and poets,

237

LONDON, 174, 221; Roman, 182
LONDON CLAY, 7, 84, QI, 222
LONG MELIORD, building's at, 137
LONGMYND, 46, 50, I I 1
LOWLANDS, Scottish, 31, 56
I^oxomnWy 64-5

LUDLOW SHALES, 54
LULLINCLSTONE PARK, Roman Villa
in, 179

I, YELL, CHARI. 4 iS, 33
LYME REGIS, 72 , IO5

MAESHOWE, Megalithic tomb at, 114
MAGMA, 20 , 51
MAIDEN CASTLE, 171
MALVERN IlIl.LS, 23, 65
MAMMALS, 37, 67; Cretaceous, 82;
Eocene, 90

MANCHESTER, 204; Exchange, stone
for. 1 17; Tov/n Hal), stone for,
117

MARIiLK, CARRARA, 102
MARBLES, for building, 116; see
also Purbeck marble
MASTODON, 91
MATERIALISM, 2 l 6
MEDITERRANEAN, The formation
of, 85

MENDIP HILLS, 53, 150
MERCIA, 1 88
MERCIAN HEIGHTS, 23
MESOLITHIC, food gathcrcrs, 1 53“4;

hunters, appearance of, 160
MESOZOIC ERA, 69
METEORS, 25

MIDDLE EAST, rise of civilization,

154

MIDLANDS, The English, 79, 210
MICHELANGELO, 102
MILLER, HUGH, 58-9, 73, II3
MILLSTONE GRIT, 62, 65, I06; for
building, 114--17
MILLWALL DOCKS, StOnC for, II7
MiNERAiiJ, effect on population, 141
Roman control of, 177
MINING, coal, 196
MIOCENE PERIOD, 85-6
MONKEYS, 91

MOON, The, 12, 14
MOORE, HENRY, IO2--5, 227

MORETON-IN -THE-MARSH, glaciers
»t, 95

MOSASAURS, 82, 90
MOTHER, The Great, 100, r58“63,
IQ 7 , 210, 213, 226
MOTTLED SANDSTONE, Lower, 70;
Upper, 70

MOUNTAIN BUILDING, Caledonian,
22, 24; Alpine, 23 -4, 85; Armori-
can, 23-4, 65

MOUNTAINS, effect on character,
188

MOURNE MTS., 86

MOZART, W. A. 34“5

MURCHISON, SIR RODERICK, 32-3,

53,74.113

NASH, PAUL, 226
NAUTILUS, The, 28
NEANDERTHAL MAN, I47-9
NEEDLES, The, 86

NEOLITHIC PERIOD, I 54-60; pcoplcS,
appearance of, 160
NE\VCi\STLE TOWN HALL, Stone for,

117

NEUTON, SIR ISAAC, 26'-9, 34-5

NICHOLSON, REN, 87

NICHOLSON, NORMAN, 66

NORDIC RACE, 160

NORMAN Architecture, 191- 2

NORMANS, 190-2

NORSEMEN, settlement of, 189

NORTH RIDING, 7 1

NORTH TYNE, Roman bridge across,

117

NORWAY, 56, 62; glaciers from, 97

OLD STONE AGE, 1 45-5 2
OLIGOCKNE PERIOD, 33
ONION WEATHERINC;, 1 7
ORDOVICIAN, period, 32, 50; rocks
for building, 1 1 1
OSTRACODERMS, 56-60
OUSE, Yorkshire, 94
OXFORD, stone for buildings in, 124

PACIFIC, The, 84

PALAEOLITHIC, era, 66; hunters,

150

PALMER, SAMUEL, 226
PAVILAND, THE RED LADY of, I50
PEMBROKESHIRE, 50; Blue StOHC
from, 100

245

A LAND

PENNINES, The, 23, 65-6, 69. 97,
230, 234; Mesolithic man on, 153

PENTLAND HILLS, 50
PERMIAN ac;e, 66
PETERBOROUGH CATHEDRAL, 126
PETERHOUSE, Cambridge, stone for,
134

PHARAOHS, 'Ilie, 7<), 83
PICTS, matriarchal tradition among,
163

PILTDOWN MAN, 1 46-7
PIPER, JOHN, 9b

PLACE-NAMES, earliest, 151; British
and Anglo-Saxon, 187
PLACENTA, The, 8 2-3, 214
PLESlOSAlTt, 74, 78
PLIOCENE PERIOD, 87, 89, 93
POETS, 8, 237

PORTLAND STONE, 72 , 76, II 8, 1 27;

for building, i27'-30
PORTSDOWN HrL 1 ..S, 86
POSEIDON OCEAN, 45--6, 49-5O, 53,

55-6

POTTERY, earliest, 158; mass pro-
duction of, 205

PRE-CAMBRIAN PERIOD, 32, 43-5

PRIMATES, The, 91-2

PRIMROSE HILL, London, 7, 84, 221,

235

PROCONSUL, manlike ape, 92
PROUST, MARCEL, 34 ” 5 , 4I, 175
PTERODACTYLS, 8l- 2 , 90
PUGIN, A. \V. N,, I 18
PURBECK, Isle of, 86; marble, 72.

76; lagoon, 80
PYRAMIDS, The, 79
PYTHEAS, 175

RED LADY OF PAMLAND, The, 150
RED SANDSTONE, 1 8; Old, 58-9, 62,

1 13; New, 66; New, for building,
117

RENAISSANCE, architecture, 125,
141; intellect, 197, 203
REPTILES, 36, 67, 78, 8 1-2, 90
RILKE, R. M,, 93
RHINE, The, 89
RHINNS OF GALLOWAY, 50
RHYOLITES, 21

ROCHE ABBEY, quarries at, 107
ROCKS, for building, 121-9; sedi-
mentary, 19-21; sedimentary, for
building, no; igneous or vol-
canic, 20-1, 96, no; igneous,
used for axes, 157; Cambrian,

in; Pre-Cambrian, n 1 ; Ordovi-
cian, for building, 111; CarV)oni-
ferous, for building, 115-17
RODIN, AUGUSTE, 102, I04
ROMAN, period, 177-82; roads, 177;
towns, 177-8; sculpture at
Lullingstone, iSo-i; Province,
collapse of, 182

ROMSEY, 126; Abbey, stone for, 107
HOWNTREE, KENNETH, 13T

ST. ALDHELM, of Malmcshury, 128;

and box stone, 128
ST. GEORGE’S CHAi‘EL, Windsor,
stone for reredos, 120

ST. GEORGE’S LAND, 56- 7
ST. JOHN THE DIVINE, NcW York, T 93
ST. KiLDA, 20; wrens of, 35
ST. Paul’s cathedral, London,
24, 196-7; stone for, 107,

129-30, 221; earlier foundations,

13 1

SAi.LSBURY PI.AIN, 1 74; sai'sens on,
132; importance of, 164
.SAi.r, 69, 204

sanctuaries, Bronze .\ge, 164
SANDSTONE, 18- I9, 87
HAUSEN STONE, 1 32
SATURN, 12

SAXONS, inMision of, 183
SAXONY, king of, 74
SAXTON, chiustopher, liis atkis,
194

.SCIENCE MUSEUM, London, 25
.SCI LUES, The 21

scoLT HEAD, bird sanctuary, Mr.

Chesney, guardian, 136
SCULPTURE, and stonc, loi
SCOTLAND, i6f,; north-west, 46, 62;

Southern Uplands of, 54-6
SEA-LILIES, see Crinoids
SEA-URCHINS, 52, 81; as sun-

symbols, 52

.SEDGl^WICK, HENRY, 32, 50, 53
SEVERN, river, 94

SHAKESI'EARE, WTLLIAM, and map
of England, 194; his country, 196
SHEFFIELD liOARD SCHOOL, StOne
for, 1 17

SHREWS, tree, 91

SILURIAN, period, 32, 53; rocks, 54

SILVER, 196

SITWELL, EDITH, 1 85

SKARA BRAE, II4

SKIDDAW, 46, 50

246

INDEX

SKV GOD, Tlie, lOO, 158, 161
SKYE, Coolins, 86

SLATES, for roofinj?, 111-12; 223;
Cornish, 58

SMITH, WILLIAM, 27, 30, 49, 206

SNOWDON, 51, 80

SPEECH, development of, 150

SPONGES, 49, 81

SPOONER, W. A. q6

srANDARD OF LIVING, a new fetish,

217

STAUFISH, 81

STATE, the centralized, 215
SI RGOSAI UL’S, 78-9
STIRLING CASTl.F, 86
SrONEHENGE, lOO, 164, 1 74; BluC

Stones of, 107; sarsens for
building', 132; its corruption, 133

STRANGE, JOHN, 27, 3 O
S rONESlTELD, i 24
STRAND, 'rhe, London, 24
STRATIGRAPHY, 27 , 3 O
SUIUTRBANIZATION, 207~8
SUSSEX WEALD, 30, 195; iron mines
in, X70

SUTHERLAND, GRAHAM, 102
S W'ANSt. :OM HE MAN , 1 46 - 7
SO NTHETOCEKAS, 29, 35

TACITUS, 178

•l AKSIERS, 37, 91

TAYXTON, quarries at, 124

TEA GRI-EN iMARI-S, JO

TECHNOLOGY, I 45

TETHYS, 56, 65, 79, 84-5

THAMES, d'he 9; Valley, 87

THORNEV ABBEY, Stone for, 107, 126

TIGER, sabre-toothed, 91

TILES, Stoncsficld, 123

TIN, 22 , 165, 169

tin'iac;el, Rocky Valley, 88

TOMusroNE, 100

TORI OISES, 9

TOWNS, 206-10

TRANSPORT, and the Industrial
Revolution, 206; of building
material, 106-8

TREES: fern, 76, 83; maidenhair, 76,
9L magnolia, 83; poplar,

83; plane, 83; deciduous, 83, 91;
Nipa palm, 91; plane, 91; beech,
98; birch, 98; lime, 98; oak, 91,
98; pine, 98; willow, 98
TRENT, river, 94
TREVELYAN, G. M., lOO

TRIASSIC PERIOD, 70-I
TRIBAL REGIONS, with their capitals,
178

TRILOBITES, 35, 48, 5 1-2, 67
TRINITY COLLEGE, Cambridge, stone
for, 127, cobble in Great Court,
136

TUNBRIDGE WELLS, High Rocks of
Tyrannosaurus f 82, 203

UPPER SLAUGHTER, 23O
URBAN I ZATI ON , 2o6- 1 0

VALE OF PICKERING, 94
VALE OF YORK, 72, 94; brick building
in, 138

VANIR GODS, 162
VARLEY, CORNELIUS, 21 3

Venus’s flower baskets, sponges,
81

VERTEBRATES, 55

VESUVIUS, Mt.', 23
VICTORIANS, The, 32, 1 1 5, 121
VIKINGS, at jMaeshowe, 114
VILLAS, Roman, 179
Vh'iparuSy water-snail, 76
VOLCANOES, 23-4, 86

WALES, Highlands of, 80; South, 65;
South-\Vest, 23, 50; North, 46,
55; Central, 54; survival of
Neolithic types in, 160; in
Roman times, 178
WATERLOO BRIDGE, London, stone
of, 109

W'ATT, JAMES, 1 98, 202 , 2 o 6
WTiALDEN LAKE, So
w^EALDON, dome, 84-5
WEDGW'OOD, JOSIAH, 205
W'ELLS CATHEDRAL, Stone for, 122
WENl*OCK EDGE, 53
WENLOCK LIMESTONE, 53
WENSLEYDALE, building in, 1 15
WESTMINSTER ABBEY, StOIlC for, IO7
WESTMORLAND, 55, 69
WHITEHALL, Banqueting Hall, stone
for, 128

WHITE TOWTiR, London, 192
WICKLOW’ HILLS, gold from, i66
WIGTOWN, 54
WILSON, RICHARD, 96
WINDSOR CASTLE, chalk bclow, 86
WODEHOUSE, P, G., JO
W^OI.FERTON STATION, T 3 T

247

A LAND

WOOL TRADE, 204

WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM, 68, 236-8;

at Stonehenge, 133
WREKIN, The, 50, 69
WREN, CHRISTOPHER, III, 1 29-30
WRITING, introduction of, 175
WULFERE, KING, 1 26
Wutheiring Heights^ 233

YEATS, W. B., 224

YORKSHIRE, 23 1 ; cliff roses, 76;
effects of glaciers in, 96; Dales,
scene in, 233-4
YOUNG, ARTHUR, 210 , 2 17

ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS, LONDON, 221

248

srwi^PT 3R>R*ft, 5?^n>Mir

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